Sounds like a silly question right?
Well here's the more detailed version? I'm asking it straight up just to see what kind of variety of answers I get.
I've played from the following lists:
14 of the Digest Top 100
12 of the GOLF Top 100
17 of the GolfWeek Top 100*
Total courses represented by those three lists: 22
Of those 22:
8 make all three lists
6 make 2 lists
8 only make one of the three lists.
So I ask again, if I were rating the courses I've played, how many of them should I consider "top 100" in the US? Why?
Muddling things a little bit for me is that I have four courses that I consider to be among my top 15 or so courses played that don't make ANY of the three lists in the format above. Three of those make the GolfWeek lists, just not in the top 50, and the other is brand new and will likely make the lists eventually.
Part of the reason I ask is that on two other ranking threads I debated whether I thought Crooked Stick and Arcadia Bluffs were top 100 courses. In thinking through that I arrived at this question. I then went back and counted from each list to arrive at this post.
* For GolfWeek, I took the top 50 modern and top 50 classic courses for lack of a better way to do it. GD has about a 50/50 split while GOLF leans much harder toward the classics.