After three shootouts to open the 2025 season, the PGA TOUR circuit will get a little tougher this week at the Farmers Insurance Open. While the five courses that hosted the season’s opening three tournaments regularly rank among the easiest on the PGA TOUR, this week’s host — Torrey Pines Golf Course (South) in San Diego, California — bares its teeth regularly. It has hosted the U.S. Open twice and was recently selected as the host of The Genesis Invitational after it was moved away from Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles after last week’s devastating wildfires.
As a full field of 156 players prepare to tee it up at Torrey Pines, there are plenty of options available for DFS players at DraftKings. Of course, stars like World No. 6 Ludvig Aberg ($10,800) and The Sentry champion Hideki Matsuyama ($10,700) have the highest price tags. However, there are plenty of cheaper options who should return good value this weekend.
Set your DraftKings fantasy golf lineups here: PGA TOUR $500K Pitch-and-Putt [$100K to 1st]
While Torrey Pines has many defenses, including thick rough, unpredictable coastal breeze, and 7,765 yards of length, it is primarily known for its putting difficulty. Its greens are just 4,500 square feet on average after being shrunk during the 2019 renovations, and in 2024, it was the ninth-most difficult course on TOUR, conceding just 1,024 birdies or better and playing to a scoring average of +0.403. It is significantly more difficult than average among the PGA TOUR’s courses for short, midrange, and long putts.
Winners of the Farmers Insurance Open need to be lights-out with the flat stick, which is why Justin Lower ($7,300) is a great value play this week. The 35-year-old, who’s enjoying a successful start to his seventh season on the PGA TOUR across two stints, has been a consistently great putter across the last few years. This season, he ranks 13th in Strokes Gained: Putting after ranking 31st in the category in 2024 and 35th in 2022-23.
So far in 2025, Lower has recorded a one-putt on 47.92% of his holes, the seventh-best percentage on the PGA TOUR, and he has three-putted just twice. In 2024 — when he made his first cut at Torrey Pines, tying for 43rd — he was joint-35th in the field with a 29.25 putting average.
Lower is also in excellent form, having made seven cuts so far this season and recording four top-10 finishes. He was in the top five during back-to-back weeks of the FedEx Cup Fall events, notching a tie for second at the World Wide Technology Championship and a tie for fifth at the Butterfield Bermuda Championship in the first two weeks of November. Most recently, he tied for third with Jason Day ($9,300) at The American Express last weekend, three strokes behind winner Sepp Straka.
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