Falls from Grace

[Paul Richards]

This thread actually is posed as a two-pronged question:

I just played a very strong course in Austin, TX called
Barton Hills (Fazio Foothills).  When I looked it up on the lists
I was surprised to see it no longer on the Top 100 lists.

In fact, in 1993 it was ranked #60 by Golf Digest.  In 1995, it
fell to #95, and currently is not on their list.

In 1997, it was ranked #32 on Golfweek's Modern list, #80 in
1999, and is no longer on their list.

Question #1:  How do these courses fall from grace so
quickly?  How can a course that's the 60th best only 6 years
ago no longer make the list?  

Question #2:  Is this course-specific only with Fazio Foothills?
Did something happen here that caused its "fall from grace"?
Anyone know anything about Fazio Foothills?

[SL_Solow]

I think its more than marketing and relates to issues previously raised in numerous posts.  Many of the new courses come equipped with all the "bells and whistles", dramatic hazards, fancy clubhouses and amenities, magnificent framing, high slope and course ratings etc.  On first blush they appear to be great.  But with time unless they possess real strategic interest they tend to blend in with other similar courses and begin to fall.  Coupled with the natural tendency to become enamored with something new, this helps explain the fairly common phenomenon of the swift rise and fall of many high profile courses in the ratings.  Incidentally Shivas, don't be suprised if the same fate befalls one of your new favorites,The Glen.  More on that one another time

[Paul Richards]

It seems that in many cases, a new course hits the market
and people love it.  There are no houses around them
initially.

Perhaps it is the building of many homes around some of these
courses which tend to make them fall down the ranking
lists?

[Dan Grossman]

Paul,

I think this is actually a pretty good question.  (I actually found this thread after I found your housing thread).  It prompted me to go to the latest Golf Mag top 100 of the world and take a look.

First of all, the top 25 are basically the same from the prior ranking (they bounced around a little, but no one fell out of the top 25). After that (except for 99 & 100), you only have 2 newcomers, Pac Dunes and Kingsbarns, both debuting very high on the rankings (#26 and #46, respectively).  Which begs the question, will either of those two Fall From Grace?

Having played Pac Dunes 4 times since it opened, I think it will settle down in the rankings, although by no means a flame out.  I think it is one of the most fun golf courses I have ever played will always be in the top 50, but I think it will be hurt by its relative lack of difficulty.  (The course is pretty hard from the back tees, especially 18, but those tees will never be open on a public course with wind.)

Kingsbarns, on the other hand, I can see falling significantly from #46.  The site is really neat, but I had a hard time getting excited about the round for some reason.  There are a number of courses in the Kingdom of Fife, I would rather play before Kingsbarns.  (TOC, New, Elie, Crail to name a few).  I am sure that I will get more than a few differences of opinion with this assertion, but we'll have to wait until September 2003 to see if I am wrong!  Was anyone else disappointed with Kingsbarns?

[Paul Richards]

Dan G:

thanks for an excellent response.

I too think that Kingsbarns will fall, althought I also really
enjoyed the round, I don't see any compelling reason or
need to go back there before I see other courses.

[Daryl "Turboe" Boe]

This post will not even address the other changes that happen to a course that we have discussed above and in the HOUSES thread.

I think the other things that comes into play are human nature and the laws of statistical sampling.  It is logical that no two people are the same and thus do not give exact same ratings if they saw the same course.

Since I know from reading that at least one magazine ratings database is constantly purging itself of older ratings that fall out as they pass a certain length of time in the data pool.   And I assume other rankings do the same thing to make sure that a rating done 10 years ago does not stay in there forever (especially conditioning or its effect on the overall rating).

Now is when the human nature effect comes into play.  Depending on what people submitted the ratings that are currently in the data pool and making up a particular courses ranking at any given time, you have at least two variables that come into play.

1. is that again two different people are going to rate the same course differently.  Because they may have different preferances and thus not like the exact same courses the same ways.  That is obvious to most.

But what may not be so obvious.

2. Even when two people in their minds eye see the same relative merit of a course they may have a tendancy to rate slightly higher or lower numbers than another person might.  I have heard someone who is a panelist for some publication say "I very rarely give anything over a 5-6."  Well when you see the quality of courses that he does I don't know how most of the courses couldn't help but be in the 7-9 range.  Some people just feel obliged to be harder on a course than others.


Take two different people who actually feel the same about a particular course one (lets call him Mr. Grinch) may give it a 6 feeling it is a great rating (one of the best he has ever given), the other guy (Mr. Happy) gives it a 9 feeling the exact same way. That is fine if both guys play all of the same courses because they will average each other out and I guess that is the master plan of a ratings pool.  But, depending on whether or not a particular course gets rated by Mr. Happy as opposed to Mr. Grinch (and maybe even a few more Grinch types) you will get some natural fluctuation.  When the difference between being in the top 100 and not being there is that small of a margin, changes will no doubt occur.

Then again that is the mathmatical/statistical sampling reason for changes.  Lets face it these ratings are meant to be an entertainment mechanism and a conversation piece.  And how much conversation would there be if the rankings never changed at all.  NONE!!!  BORING!!!

And that is not the goal of these excercizes, so beyond the mathmatical/statistical sampling explination of why it happens.  It also meets the desires of those that put out the rankings.  Mostly keeping peoples interest.

[Paul Richards]

Turboe:

I appreciate your comments and your thoughts.

However, even if your assessment is correct, how do you
explain a course that falls over 40 spots in just 4 years?

The old ratings wouldn't be purged, so a whole new set
of ratings isn't being applied.

Could it be that new courses subjectively get rated higher
than they should?

[Daryl "Turboe" Boe]

The old ratings wouldn't be purged, so a whole new set
of ratings isn't being applied.

Could it be that new courses subjectively get rated higher
than they should?

Paul,

I would think that that may have something to do with it, also certain changes to the course as mentioned in the HOUSE thread (conditions, Hurricanes, etc).  

But I also think the mathmatical items I mentioned above can effect it more than you might think.  Remember that the data pool would be purging scores continuously as they age each year, and that four years worth of ratings have been purged during that time.  Considering how small the margin between courses can be it is no wonder that a small movement in point total can move a course quite severly.

Using your example of a course falling 40 spots.  I dont know for sure which one you were referring to, but lets use GD list as an example if you look at the course in 61 slot last time at 57.84 points could fall completely out of the top 100 if its point average fell just a little over 2 points to 55.52 that would work out to about 1/4 of a point in each of the 8 categories.  When you put it in that terms it is easy to see how volitile the ratings can be, and why you can see so much movement.  

Just a mathmatical theory.  

Again I think there are many other physical and psychological factors that are in play to a much greater degree.  I am merely trying to focus on this small theory and how it could be a factor as well.

[mps]

Paul - Dan,

I've got a different perspective on Kingsbarns.  In addition to the obvious scenic splendor, I thought it offered great variety, challenge & fun.  Played it with 6 other Americans (we also played Muirfield, TOC, NB, Turnberry, Carnoustie, WG, Gullane, Crail) & 6 out of 7 put it in their top 3 (after TOC & Turnberry - of course we played Kingsbarns in perfect weather & both days at Muirfield were miserable). The 7th guy did rate it fairly low on the list (behind all but Crail) - he is a traditionalist.  IMO as this course matures it will only gain in popularity.

The course that I expect to fall is Old Head - overrated course with an unbelievable setting.

Anyway, popular opinion changes - this has been going on forever.  A century ago Darwin dedicated something like 8 pages of his wonderful book to Royal Liverpool, 4 pages to Lytham & St. Annes, 3 pages to Formby & 2 pages to WALLASEY.  Birkdale was only mentioned in one sentence - it was lumped together with the other courses in the Lancashire/Cheshire area!  Today ROYAL Birkdale is viewed my most people as the best of the bunch & most people have never heard of Wallasey.

[texsport]

Turboe has got it right. So many courses are close together in the point totals that even small changes in the latest rating might cause a course to dive down the ratings.

The mathematical/statistical arguement is really obvious when you consider out-of-the-way courses that may not be rated very often. And then there's the issue of walking and historical points which skew GD's list.

Do courses that don't buy advertizing in GD get dropped?

[Paul Richards]

mps:

You're right about Old Head.  Great scenery, average course,
except for a couple really good holes.

However, I loved Old Head, and even when it does drop out
of the Top 100, I'll still go there, play it, and love it!

[Tim_Weiman]

MPS:

The Old Head will not fall from grace.

It already did.......about two or three years ago.

[wsmorrison]

I agree with Dan G and Paul Richards regarding Kingsbarns.  I played it only once, the windiest conditions I've ever played in, yet aside from dramatic views, the course was quirky and I felt an awkwardness about the place.  The ninth green was not golf as I am used to; the pin placed on a narrow plateau surrounded by deep swales and overly-contoured.  Rollercoaster greens are inferior in MHO to subtle yet complex greens.  Perhaps the man-made look of Kingsbarns just doesn't fit juxtaposed to the natural splendor of other courses in Fife and beyond.

[Matt Schulte]

I agree that politics do play.  I was at Arcadia Bluffs in August of 2000, the year it opened.  We sat through an 8 hour fog delay.  I chatted with their Head Pro, who shared with us their ownership's philosophy of making magazine raters pay when they come to rate the course.  He also mentioned that one magazine rater wrote an article about it without having ever stepped foot on the course.

It is not then surprising to see the Golf Magazine's Top 100 You Can Play list place Arcadia Bluffs at 81.  Part of that ranking may be that because the course was so new only a handful of raters had actually played the course.  

Which raises another interesting question;  "Should a course be inelligible until a minimun number of raters have played it?"  Using "Turboe's" theory, it would appear to me that a foursome of Grinch's (who prefer their own company) were the only raters from Golf Magazine who played the coure.  Without an adequate sample group any new course could than be ranked too high, thus resulting in the "Fall from Grace" as the rest of the panelists see the course.

To return to the Arcadia Bluffs example.  I believe once the rest of the panelists arrive, its rankings will rise rather than fall.  I think their policy regarding paying to play, while it may be noble in principle, seems a little shortsighted.  A high ranking represents enourmous interest in a new course.  Play the game.

[Daryl "Turboe" Boe]

I am not sure, but don't most of the rankings have a minimium number of ratings that must be recieved before a course is eligible?

I think GD requires at least 10 ratings minumum be received on any course before it can be eligible for anything.  Hopefully they receive even more than that, thus diminishing any outlying ratings whether high or low from adversely effecting the courses postion too much.

[Jim_Bick]

While the problem of too few raters skewing results is probably not an issue for top 100, it can be a big issue for the best in state listings. Big swings do occur because the small pool of raters gets disproportionately to the newer names, pushing them up the list, for all the reasons previously mentioned. When they go up, others go down.

Jim

[texsport]

I believe that GD requires 10 ratings before a course is eligible for making a list. In their latest issue they announced the 100 Best Resorts and 10 was the minimum.

I admit ignorance of the process required to get a course rated. Is there a game to play? Do the architects play a role? How hard is it to get 10 ratings if your course is in Nowhereville Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Louisiana, etc.

[David Wigler]

Texsport,

There is no game to play.  It is as simple as "If they build it, we will come."  If you look at the top four in Golfweek's Modern Rankings, they are Sand Hills, Bandon Dunes, Whistling Straits, and Pete Dye Golf Club.  They are located in Mullen Nebraska, Coos Bay Oregon, Sheboygan Wisconsin, and Bridgeport West Virginia.  Number 5 is Shadow Creek in Las Vegas.  Shadow Creek is the first course located with 100 miles of a town with 20,000 people.  If a course claims that it is underrated because it cannot get raters, than it is either brand new or kidding itself.  Architects can play a role - Tom Doak invited a group of raters to Pacific Dunes before it opened because he wanted to make sure it had enough raters on it to get rated - but usually don't.  In theory, cost is irrelevant.  La Costa is a two whether it is free or $200.  Conversely, Bandon Dunes can charge whatever they want and I still cannot wait to get back.

[Anthony_Nysse]

Atlantic Golf Club, located in Bridgehampton, NY is a sample of Fallen from Grace. Atlantic opened up to alot of fan fare in 1992 by winning Best New Private and hitting the rankings at #65. It's hosted Several Met Open and others. It has steadily dropped since, now being rated #100 and hanging on by a thread. They just renovated their tees to square ones to bring more of a traditional feel to the course...maybe it will help out in the rankings

[Paul Richards]

Anthony:

IMHO, too much, too late.  

I would expect Atlantic to fall off the next list.  That thread
it is hanging on by is awfully thin!

[Ron_Whitten]

Old thread, but I just stumbled across it and feel I must respond.

First, courses don't "fall from grace" because they don't advertise in Golf Digest. There is a strict absolute separation of church and state at Golf Digest. Advertising and editorial are completely separate. Golf Digest's rankings, which I've coordinated since 1985, has never been influenced by advertisers, amount of advertising (or lack thereof) or anything like that. In fact, most courses on the 100 Greatest are private, and dont' advertise anywhere.

Second, some define "fall from grace" as a slip within the 100 Greatest. Even if it ends up at No. 100, as Atlantic is this year, it's still one of the elite 100 in a nation of 16,000 courses. Some disgrace, eh?

Others consider it a "fall from grace" if the course drops off the list.  It irritates me sometimes that we in the magazine business (not just golf magazines, but magazines in general) have created this "list" mentality whereby, if a golf course (or restaurant or movie or movie star or whatever) isn't among the op 10 (or Top 25 or Top 100), it's not worth anything.  Gosh, a course was once on the 100 Greatest but isn't any longer. Big disgrace?  Hardly.  Still worth playing, especially if it just happens to be one that's been overlooked or forgotten in recent years.

With Golf Digest's rankings, it takes a minimum of 30 evaluations to qualify for the list. We retain the evaluations for 10 years, and supplement them.  But 10 years (3 surveys) later, evaluations start to expire. Sometimes we don't receive enough supplemental evaluations and some courses slip in the ratings or drop out completely.  As Darryl Boe pointed out, with so many courses tightly bunched in our numerical scoring system, a dip of an eighth of a point in each of the categories can mean the difference between a Top 40 ranking and completely off the list.

How can a course drop 40 spots in one two year period? By slipping 20 spots and having 20 courses overtake it.  Not that hard with so many courses competing.

But, ultimately, what happens to certain courses is the simple fact that tastes change.  In the early 1980s, the Nicklaus "conehead mound" architectural style was all the rage for a while.  Loxahatchee and Grand Cypress made our 100 Greatest. By the end of the decade, it fell out of style, as reflected by our panelists evaluations.  Six years ago, Mike Strantz's stuff was all the rage. Royal New Kent made our 100 Greatest.  Now there's been some backlash about his architecture (including some on this web site) and he's not as hot as he was. Royal New Kent dropped off the list, more as a result of lousy conditioning than anything else.  

Oh yeah, even before the era of magazine lists, architectural styles were in and out of fashion.  People never thought twice about planting the hell out of Donald Ross' open landscapes. Tillinghast was so forgotten that when Frank Hannigan wrote his 1974 piece on him, it was the first mention of him in print in decades.

As far as I'm concerned, if any course has undergone the scrutiny that Golf Digest places upon golf courses and succeeds in making the 100 Greatest, even for one brief two year period, it's a badge of honor that I'll always respect.  Even if others think it has fallen from grace.

[Paul Richards]

Ron:

Thank you for the reply and for the explanation.

The reason for the thread and its title is that I really
wondered why a course that is so good a few years back,
can now no longer be considered quite so good.

If a course is #101 or #187 or whatever, we, the reading public, will never know since the list only extends to #100.

I guess the changing tastes and the different raters that
visit a course have as much to do with it as anything else.

On a personal note, do you find that a course that debuts
with no housing, and everyone likes, that you revisit it a
few years later and it's surrounded by housing, does that
drop the course's ranking?

[Jeff_Lewis]

Paul, I find that I look at the GD state-by-state lists quite often to get a good sense of what the noteworthy courses are that are just off the list. Obviously some states are stronger than others, but the first 3-5 courses on any state's list not in the top 100 are probably pretty darn good. Let's look at the next 6 in IL, which you certainly know better than any of us. Rich Harvest, Skokie, Beverly, O Fields (South), WeaverRidge, Knollwood....pretty good stuff, yes?

[Ran Morrissett]

Paul,

Re: buildings, a course that is sinking is Cabo del Sol. We first played it two years after it opened and it was WONDERFUL  - great piece of property, very fine design and tons of really good holes. It had it all.

It deservedly got to something like #60 in the GOLF world list but has been sliding back ever since until (I guess) it will be gone in the 2003 rankings, which is a decade after it opened.

I haven't been back but those that have say that the buildings have killed the property's inspiring nature, in part because the low lying native vegetation does little to hide the buildings. I was told that there is now a gaint structure on the far side of dogleg on the hill   instead of the cacti/native scrub.

What can you say? I assume its top 100 status helped sell some of the homesites etc. and that very thing seems to be costing it dearly. I think Nicklaus genuinely considered this one of his very finest - and many of his most talented men were on the project. Pity to see their design get masked by a bunch of buildings.

Cheers,

[Scott_Burroughs]

Several people here have said that Troon North isn't nearly the same since it's become a housing track.  Of course, some people also say it didn't deserve it's Top 100 ranking in the first place.  Haven't played it, don't know.

I, for one, would be very interested to see the next 100, 101-200, on all of the BIG LISTS.  The number of courses in this country has practically doubled in the past couple decades or so, so a Top 200 would be almost equivalent to Top 100 when it first started.