During its 36-year existence, the Official World Golf Ranking formula has been altered more frequently than a Donald Trump alibi but, unlike the latter, seems finally to have reached a point where it is both authentic and defensible.
The latest iteration debuted this week, the product of a four-year review. The math isn’t much easier to grasp for most of us, but the principle underpinning it is this — a tournament’s available ranking points be determined by one factor, the quality of its competitors. Gone are the arbitrary devices used by global golf circuits to inflate their importance and prop up events that had long since lost luster. Going forward, the ranking will no longer be hostage to the marketing and machinations of its member tours.
The old system was as compromised as a Russian election when Comrade Vlad is on the ballot. The number of ranking points a tournament offered its champion was based on its strength of field, but if a field was weak then each member tour — there are 23 — had a pre-determined “minimum” number of points it could award the winner instead. Every time a tour relied upon minimums to cover for an anemic field, the tournament in question was overvalued and bias was injected into the ranking. And every tour was guilty.
The PGA Tour used its assigned minimum points in opposite-field events, or in about 10-12% of its schedule. The DP World Tour did so in about half of its events, while other tours did it almost every time they played. The distortions didn’t end there. Tours could also declare a “flagship” tournament, bestowing status on an event that often inflated its value far beyond the quality of the field it attracted. The entire process was as much politics as statistics.
In the new system, every player is assigned a Strokes Gained World Rating based on two years of scores. That rating determines how many points he contributes to an event, and the total of all competitors’ points is what the field plays for. The more elite players who enter, the more points they compete for. Crucially, it’s all tour agnostic — no contrived minimums, no backroom politicking, nothing but the caliber of entrants determines the ranking value of a tournament. There will inevitably be cries from some that their home tour is now undervalued, but in reality, their tour was previously artificially overvalued.
“With these changes, players and tournaments in different parts of the world can be compared with a…
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