Eat What You Kill
Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR)
There are many moving parts in the world of professional golf right now. LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed rival golf league, continues to poach players from the PGA Tour by offering huge sums of money. The PGA Tour has banned those golfers from competing in PGA Tour events. The Justice Department is investigating the PGA Tour over potential antitrust violations.
Like many others have pointed out, all eyes are on how the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR) will handle LIV Golf.
The OWGR:
Delegates ranking points to players across all accredited golf tours around the world
Serves as the primary criteria for players to gain entrance into the major championships, each of which is operated by an independent-ish governing body
Ex. One way to qualify for the Masters is to be ranked in the top 50 of the Official World Golf Rankings
For the foreseeable future, the OWGR is one of the most important topics in golf. So let’s demystify the methodology and discuss a couple key implications.
Fundamentally, the system awards points to players based on strengths of fields. The Players Championship awards more points to a 10th place finish than the 3M Open does, for example. Thus, it’s sort of an “Eat What You Kill” system. If you aspire to ascend to World Number 1, you need to play in strong fields. You need to beat good players.
(Note: the OWGR methodology is changing in a couple of weeks. Those changes are substantively inconsequential for the purposes of this newsletter. The points made in this newsletter will stand.)
Players accrue points over a rolling 104-week period with stronger weighting towards recent events. The most recent 13 weeks on the calendar receive full weight; older events decay. Important distinction: full weighting is given to eligible events over the world’s last 13 weeks, not your last 13 weeks. Then your ranking is the sum of your weight-adjusted points divided by the number of events you’ve played in the last 104 weeks (Minimum denominator = 40 and Maximum denominator = 52).
See below how a subset of Justin Rose’s events change in the OWGR week over week when Justin Rose did not play any golf:
You should notice that in both tables, Rose is receiving full weight (Weight = 1) in his most recent five events because all of those events fall within the most recent 13 weeks in the world calendar.
You should also notice that the rest of his displayed events have a stronger decay factor (i.e. less weight) in Week 29 compared to Week 28. The rest of his tournaments (approx. 30 not displayed) increasingly decay until the oldest one is being multiplied by almost zero. That’s how the decay schedule works.
Well, LIV Golf has applied for OWGR accreditation. The OWGR board, which includes PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, must now decide whether or not to accredit LIV Golf. By banning LIV golfers from the PGA Tour, Monahan is blocking access to strongly-fielded events. Until accredited by the OWGR board, which may or may not happen, LIV events are irrelevant from an OWGR perspective. LIV golfers’ rankings are dropping. Quickly.
Unless LIV receives accreditation soon, LIV golfers will miss out on qualifying for major championships, the pinnacle of the sport.
Ok, did you get all that? OWGR points are the international currency for entrance into the sport’s biggest tournaments, and they are earned by beating highly-ranked players on accredited tours.
So here are two things for you to watch while the OWGR battle ensues.
1) Delayed Signings
Cam Smith, Ranked #2 in the OWGR, is rumored to be heading to LIV fresh off winning the Open Championship. Some reports suggest he’ll be waiting until after the Presidents Cup in September to make it official. This is…rational.
Cam Smith, whose Open Championship win granted him a five-year exemption into each of the majors, is valuable to LIV Golf in that he is an elite talent and can captain their inevitable Team Australia. But he’s also valuable in that he provides a field strength boost to every tournament he enters. In an “Eat What You Kill” system, it’s better to beat World No. 2 Cam Smith than it is to beat World No. 18 Cam Smith.
As soon as a player signs with LIV Golf, his world ranking enters a free fall, at least until accreditation. I would not be surprised if LIV temporarily pumps the brakes on signing top players.
An unwise sequence for LIV: Sign top players amidst OWGR negotiations → players’ rankings tank → receive OWGR accreditation → have an isolated group of 48 now low-ranked players battling amongst each other for a low number of OWGR points.
2) PGA Tour Invites/Exemptions
While the OWGR battle gets sorted out, we may see some LIV golfers start to play Asian Tour events. They’re not banned from those. Though Asian Tour events have relatively weak fields, playing in these events can prevent a rankings free fall, especially if multiple LIV golfers band together and play the tournament.
(Note: If you understand how the OWGR system works, as outlined above, you recognize that the sooner LIV golfers decide do this, the better the outcome will be for them…)
If the PGA Tour is serious about making it hard for LIV players to qualify for majors, the Tour should be plucking highly-ranked non-LIV golfers from the Asian Tour. Grant them invites into tournaments. Not only would this strengthen PGA Tour fields, but it would also reduce the points available for LIV golfers to earn in Asian Tour events.
As the PGA Tour and LIV compete for the sport’s top talent, players’ OWGR points will be coveted…
Trump/LIV
Here’s a headline you haven’t seen anywhere: “Former President Trump’s involvement with LIV Golf explained: ”
You might think that headline doesn’t exist because Trump isn’t involved with LIV Golf, but au contraire, he is. That headline doesn’t exist because people are scared to write it.
If you want to know why people are scared to write it, read the replies to my tweet below:
Or you can have a pleasant day instead.
There’s a difference between making charged political statements and reporting fairly on a massive story involving a political figure. So let’s do the latter.
From LIV Golf’s inception, a number of details have connected Former President Trump to LIV. LIV Golf is hosting eight tournaments in 2022; two of them are at Trump properties, including this week’s LIV event at Trump Bedminster.
The first high-profile golfer to surprise the public in signing with LIV was Dustin Johnson. He signed for a reported $125M. DJ and his wife have publicly posted pictures of themselves socializing with Trump.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has been in attendance at the Saudi International DP World Tour golf tournament. He also manages $2B of the Saudi Investment Fund.
I’m not going to try and convince you that any/all of this is bad. That isn’t within the spirit of this newsletter. But this element of the story should be reported. Isn’t it…isn’t it a bit odd to omit a detail this significant from the discussion about one of the biggest stories in sports?
Anyway, if Obama/any other former president becomes involved with LIV, there will be a Finding the Edge section on his involvement too. Especially if others are too scared to talk about it.
Would It Dong?
Major League Baseball stadiums are of different dimensions. Not every fence is the same height and distances to the fences are different by stadium. Sometimes when a player hits a long fly ball to the warning track, it would have been a home run at another stadium. Thus, based on a player’s historical hitting pattern, he has different value depending on the stadium. It’s an interesting front office consideration when building out a roster.
Well if you see a home run and are curious if it would have been a home run in every stadium, there is a Twitter bot for that:
Ok, fine, not all Twitter bots are bad. I much prefer this one to the ones that’ll inundate me with Pat Perez’s tee times in Jeddah.
Feedback/Contact
Twitter: @JosephLaMagna
Email: Joseph.LaMagnaGolf@gmail.com
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