The New OWGR, Incentive Structures, and The Moonshot
OWGR
Is the new Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR) system good? Depends on your perspective.
For some quick background, the OWGR is a global ranking system of professional men’s golfers. You could give a player 10 World Ranking points for winning the Masters and 10 World Ranking points for winning a tournament on a development tour, but that wouldn’t really make sense. It is much harder to win the Masters than it is to win a tournament on a development tour. The OWGR attempts to solve for this by standardizing results and awarding points based on players’ finishing positions and the strength of the field.
Up until a couple of months ago, the system ranked fields mostly based on how many top players were in the field. The system also provided some tournaments with Minimum Point Totals, which boosted the points players received in many tournaments in Asia and in Europe.
Some people didn’t like this system.
They argued that the system was biased towards tours like the European Tour and the Japan Tour. They argued that if a purer system existed, one that thoroughly evaluated the entirety of a field and did not provide points floors to tournaments, the Official World Golf Rankings would more accurately reflect golf performance around the globe. They looked at leaderboards and realized that many non-PGA Tour players, whose world rankings were propped up by playing non-PGA Tour events, tended to finish near the bottom of tournaments like the World Golf Championships.
They won the argument. The OWGR committee created a new system, which evaluates the strength of the entire field and does not provide points minimums. Essentially, they designed the system to reward players strictly based on how hard it is to perform in that tournament. No bias. As a result, tournaments with small fields do not receive as many points as tournaments with larger fields receive. That is because it is much harder to beat 143 players than it is to beat 47 players.
Ok, so the new system went into effect a couple of months ago, and people are upset. Count Jon Rahm, one of the best players in the world, among the disgruntled:
Rahm voiced his displeasure in advance of last week’s DP World Tour Championship, a 50-person field that included seven of the Top 25 players in the world by OWGR. The PGA Tour’s RSM Classic, on the other hand, had 155 players and included zero of the Top 25 players in the world. Yet, the RSM Classic delegated significantly more points to its winner than the DP World Tour Championship delegated.
While there are some legitimate criticisms with respect to the new OWGR methodology, overall the system is doing a fine job at evaluating performance and assigning points values across tours. The RSM Classic had depth in talent. It bears mentioning that in the DP World Tour Championship, five of the seven aforementioned Top 25 OWGR players finished in the top six of the tournament. And Jon Rahm won. That’s pretty vindicating of the new system.
The new system said, “Hey, this field isn’t very deep and there are only fifty players. Many of these names are not that difficult for a Top 25 ranked player to beat.” And then four days later, the leaderboard agreed.
As a related aside, this reminds me of the funniest argument LIV has made thus far in its quest for Official World Golf Ranking accreditation:
If you’re trying to prove you have strong, deep fields, “Mr. Dawson, Dustin Johnson finishes in the Top 5 in all of our tournaments” isn’t a line I would have included!
Anyway, is the new Official World Golf Rankings system good? Depends on what you think the OWGR should represent.
If you think the OWGR should be a strict representation of exactly how each player stacks up globally, then the new system is a dramatic improvement upon the previous system.
If you think the OWGR should consider the incentives it creates and its impact on the global game of golf, you might consider the new system a step in the wrong direction. The new system more heavily dissuades global stars from playing in weak fields (like many countries’ national Opens). The system also forces players off non-PGA Tour circuits pretty quickly if they aspire to be a top player in the world:
Whether or not you think the new system is an improvement upon the previous system depends on what you believe the OWGR’s role should be.
To what extent should the OWGR prioritize reflecting player performance as accurately as possible? To what extent should the OWGR provide an infrastructure to facilitate the growth of golf worldwide? And to what extent are those goals incompatible with one another?
There is no perfect solution. Only trade-offs.
The PGA Tour Schedule
Generally at the end of each PGA Tour season, we meet with each of the PGA Tour players we’re working with to discuss areas of improvement, set their tournament schedule for next year, etc.
Entering the 2022-23 season, some players needed to work on their long irons, some needed to spend some time picking up club head speed, and some had room for improvement with their PIP Awareness Score. But the top priority stressed to nearly every player was identical: Play as many events in the fall as you are willing to play.
Normally on the PGA Tour, the 125 players who earn the most total FedEx Cup points make the #Playoffs and secure status for the following season. But starting this year, only the top 70 players will advance and lock up their status. Keep in mind, as I’ve written about 100 times, FedEx Cup points are not properly reflective of field strength. Tournaments in the fall often have weak fields, yet they award full FedEx Cup points.
Therefore, the importance of playing a bunch of fall tournaments had never been as high as it was this season.
Now that the fall swing is over, let’s check in on the FedEx Cup Standings:
Do you notice anything interesting about this table?
The important part of the table is the third column. Top players in the world, like Rory McIlroy and Tony Finau, only teed it up a couple times in the fall. Most players on the PGA Tour teed it up much more often, which is exactly what they should have done.
Sixty-one golfers played at least seven of the nine PGA Tour events in the fall swing. Zero golfers ranked in the Top 10 of the OWGR played more than three tournaments.
Perhaps you can anticipate where I’m going with this because I’m going to reiterate the same point I’ve been arguing since the inception of this newsletter. An exploitable system diminishes the entire season.
When you tell a player that his best chance of winning the Tour Championship is by playing a heavy fall schedule, and he elects instead to vacation and/or spend some time relaxing with family, he is signaling that winning the Tour Championship is not his top priority. To be clear, I do not blame him. I’m not going to try and convince him that the Tour Championship should be his top priority. But this is why there is no storyline throughout the season for fans to follow. This is why fans don’t consider the Tour Championship appointment viewing.
The PGA Tour needs to understand that this is a problem. Until the Tour commits to building a schedule that sets clean, proper incentives for its players (shoutout Jon Rahm), the season-ending championship will lack juice, which undermines the entertainment value of the entire season.
Changes have been announced for the 2024 PGA Tour season, many of which are positive (and align…eerily closely with this episode of the The Fried Egg podcast…). But the job isn’t finished yet.
As long as the incentive remains to play as many tournaments as possible, and as long as the number of tournaments doling out FedEx Cup points is higher than the number of events a top player should be expected to play, the problem is unresolved. And it’s a legitimate problem.
The Moonshot
I have a lot of stupid ideas bouncing around my brain that I think are good. Normally within a few days, it is clear to me that the idea is very stupid. Occasionally, after an idea has ricocheted around for awhile, it still seems good and makes it into this newsletter and then you have to read it. Here’s one.
Frequently, when an NBA team has the ball up by one point with like 27 seconds left in the game and 24 seconds on the shot clock (or any other combo where the difference in game clock versus shot clock is ~three seconds), the opposing team will not foul. Rather, they will choose to play defense, hoping their opponent will turn the ball over or miss a shot with a couple seconds left on the clock.
Often, in these situations, the team with the ball takes a bad shot. It’s understandable. After all, optionality is one of the most underrated concepts in sports, and the team with possession of the ball does not have optionality. They cannot shoot early in the shot clock. It’s way too risky. Instead, they are restricted to taking a shot with just a couple seconds left on the shot clock, which commonly leads to shots of poor quality.
It’s time to try The Moonshot.
When you have the ball in this scenario, I want someone setting a screen for my Moonshotter with 2-3 seconds left on the shot clock. The Moonshotter is going to run off the screen to half court, where he will not be defended, and he’s going to catch and shoot a half-court shot with as high a trajectory as possible.
As long as the shot hits the rim (or goes in, obviously), the game is over. Even when he airballs, there’s only going to be at most one second left on the clock. But he’s not going to airball The Moonshot because we are going to practice The Moonshot. Admittedly, this idea probably only works once, which is why it is best saved for the NBA Finals.
I don’t know; it might be stupid. There is really only one way to find out.
Feedback/Contact
Twitter: @JosephLaMagna
Email: Joseph.LaMagnaGolf@gmail.com
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