OWGR and LIV golfers

[Joe_Tucholski]

When an event like Wentworth is reduced to 54 holes for extenuating circumstances, do they only earn 75% of their original OWGR points?

I think full points, but curtailed events to 36 holes receive 75% of their calculated points:
Official World Golf Ranking - Ranking Explained (owgr.com)

Has anyone in this thread actually seen the criteria or is everyone just parroting what their preferred media source is saying?

I've spent a bit over an hour trying to find the specific criteria for inclusion and couldn't find it.  If anyone has the specific inclusion criteria I'd be interested in seeing them.  There is a good amount of information that indicates how points/rankings are calculated and coincidentally there was a pretty major change that went into effect last month.  PowerPoint Presentation (kc-usercontent.com)  All that being said it seems the board can say any event they want gets points as the Chevron World Challenge earned points with no cut, and very limited field.  Also they can say screw the calculations and give an event whatever points the board deems appropriate...see the majors getting high points regardless of what the calculations say they should.

Not sure where the outrage over the 54 hole events is coming from.  It's pretty clear 54 hole events can earn points.  I just googled the first tour listed as an official OWGR tour (AbemaTV Tour...yeah sure they deserve their points) and any guesses on how many holes they play?

If the stated mission of the OWGR was to obtain a global assessment of the best players in the world I would think LIV should be included.  However the mission is only to assess player performance in eligible golf tours.  It's clear LIV is not currently an eligible golf tour.  Should it be?  People clearly have pretty strong opinions that they shouldn't be eligible.

Interestingly the OWGR seems to have started in response to the relative dominance of the US PGA Tour money list and the R&A wanted to find the best players worldwide and used the Sony World rankings (what became the OWGR) as an exemption criteria for The Open.

[Tim_Cronin]

Joe is correct. There weren't many Americans coming over to the British (!) Open in the early 1980s because most had to qualify. One year less than two dozen Americans made the trip, I recall, and ABC made a point of mentioning it on its coverage. The R&A, wanting to beef up the field, looked at Mark McCormack's annual rankings in his World of Professional Golf tome – McCormack also sold TV rights to the tournament overseas, including to ABC, and was a commentator on the BBC broadcast – and needed a version to have a rolling, changing ranking after each week of play. McCormack found Sony as a sponsor and the world golf ranking was born.


The R&A, thus rescued by McCormack, then adjusted its qualifications and the top players earned automatic berths. The other majors followed in the late 1990s.


Yes, 54-hole tournaments can earn points, but they're supposed to be limited to developmental tours. If LIV's executives were smart, they would designate their Thursday pro-am as an official round (all 48 players are in it) and voila, you have 72 holes of stroke-play golf. Then designate the bottom third of the field as playing only for a team score in the final two rounds and you have yourself a cut for the individual stroke play competition down to the low 32. Then it would be difficult to argue against those 32 earning points, except out of spite.

[Tim Leahy]

If they are going to give OWGR to LIV then why not give them to the Champions Tour also. After all there are more former major winners playing on the Champions Tour than LIV and you can watch them on TV most weekends.

[Pete Lavallee]

Sadly they’ve boxed themselves into a corner because LXXII isn’t a word!

[A.G._Crockett]

I appreciate Peter's line of questions here.

There was once a time in which major championships were determined after 36 holes on the final day. When they changed to 18 a day for 4 days there was a public backlash that the change was going to water down the challenge and reduce the number of "real" champions.

There was also a time in which major championship playoffs were 18 holes. When that rule was changed there was a public backlash that the change was going to water down the challenge and reduce the number of "real" champions.

There was also a time in which the British open was contested over 3, 12 hole round, the next year 2, 18 hole rounds, and the next year 4, 9 hole rounds.

The point being. 72 holes of stroke play over 4 days is somewhat arbitrary. Saying its the only way tournaments can be played is not historically accurate in the slightest. Assuming that golf should not or can not be played in a different format is not accurate and biased. Not wanting change is very different than not recognizing that change is possible, change has happened before, and change is likely to occur in the future.

Why is the 100m sprint the crown jewel of track and field and the 1600 meter is relegated to non-prime time?

Wait a minute.


Pointing out (correctly) that final round and playoff formats have changed over the years, and then using that to say that 72 holes of stroke play is “arbitrary” requires a leap of logic over the Grand Canyon.  72 holes has been THE standard in professional golf for longer than any of us have been alive; that’s not “arbitrary”.


It is a well-established and very simple fact that the OWGR guidelines call for a 72 hole format with a cut after 36 holes, and I read that there are 23 tours that comply with this and get ranking points accordingly.  The LIV Tour chooses not to, which is fine.  But to choose not to and then ask to be treated as if you are the same is just juvenile.

The playoff formats were changed for TV, and we could argue the merits of that endlessly. But that is quite different from moving from 72 holes over 4 days to 54 holes over 3 days.  There is just no way around that.  It’s 3 quarters of basketball or football, and comebacks and collapses happen ALL THE TIME, just as they do in golf.


One of the really odd things about this debate ON THIS SITE is that little or no attention is being paid to the shotgun start.  I think all of us SHOULD understand that even a split tee start is problematic in terms of every player playing the same golf course, but a shotgun is well beyond that.  To think that any sequence of holes is going to be the same as any other sequence of holes is just silly, and every person on a golf course architecture sire knows that.  Or should…

[John Kavanaugh]

The NBA could change to three quarters and no results would change. They’d just play hard earlier.

[Rob Marshall]

I heard this morning on Michael Breed's show that it took two years for Tigers Hero event to get certified for world ranking points and they needed to make changes for that to happen. LIV thinks they should get in immediately?

[Ben Hollerbach]

Pointing out (correctly) that final round and playoff formats have changed over the years, and then using that to say that 72 holes of stroke play is “arbitrary” requires a leap of logic over the Grand Canyon.  72 holes has been THE standard in professional golf for longer than any of us have been alive; that’s not “arbitrary”.

Within the last 2 decades the pga tour has held 90 hole stroke play events, 126 hole match play events, Stableford events, and 2 man team events. 72 stroke play may be common, but it is not the only standard.

The playoff formats were changed for TV, and we could argue the merits of that endlessly. But that is quite different from moving from 72 holes over 4 days to 54 holes over 3 days.

Is it? Professional Golf as it exist today is primarily an entertainment product. We all like to believe tournaments are pillars of pure sport and competition, but outside of the majors we all know that's not true. Even then the majors are a balance between pure competition and entertainment spectacle. An entertainment product that has been continuously tuned and tweaked for broad consumption. So if a 36 hole Saturday finish in a major is moved to 18 Saturday and 18 Sunday and if an 18 hole playoff is shortened to sudden death or a short series of holes all in the name of providing a better entertainment product, then why is it so far fetched to think LIV's format is not based on the same logic, or that logic is flawed?

One of the really odd things about this debate ON THIS SITE is that little or no attention is being paid to the shotgun start.  I think all of us SHOULD understand that even a split tee start is problematic in terms of every player playing the same golf course, but a shotgun is well beyond that.  To think that any sequence of holes is going to be the same as any other sequence of holes is just silly, and every person on a golf course architecture sire knows that.  Or should…

This is a continuation of golf being presented for entertainment first. If one was going to watch the entirety of a LIV tournament it would take them ~15 hours over 3 days. If one was going to attempt to watch the entirety of a PGA Tour event it would take them more than 3 times as long. The shotgun allow the event to be condensed in a way that afford more complete viewership.

The shotgun format has virtually zero bearing on the leaderboard during the first 2 days. And any gripe would be similar, if not less impactful, than the morning/afternoon split you see during Thur/Fri tee times on the PGA tour. There is some gripe to the format impacting the last day, but its still also very little. The leaders still tee off on 1, 2nd place group tees off on 2, 3rd place on 3, etc... So for 17 holes you're still watching the leaders play a hole immediately after the chasers did. The only difference is what happens with the the players playing different 18th holes. But this is an area where the broadcast could do a good job of walking the viewer through the challenge faced by one player finishing up on 18 and another finishing up on 1. Especially being that both players have already played the other hole during their round. At that point you could easily speak to how hard the hole is playing on the day and how the other leader played it, to better frame the current action.

But, if viewers are unable to adapt, one modification I could see being made to the format in this regard is for the final day have the last 4 or 5 tee times all starting on 1 in sequence, and the last place 3 some starting on 12. That way the top 12-15 players would play in the sequence we're accustom to, but the overall broadcast time is still kept manageable.

Regardless. There is a significant amount of "they can't do that because that's not the way it's been done" mentality around the format, which simply isn't true. The format that golf is played under has and will continue to change. Assuming it can not change or discrediting any change is short sided.

[Bill Seitz]

Has anyone in this thread actually seen the criteria or is everyone just parroting what their preferred media source is saying?

Someone posted a list to twitter yesterday.  I can't vouch for its veracity or exclusivity, but the criteria are all things that have been discussed in media reports:


1. An embrace of inclusion and promoting non-discriminatory practices.


2. Competitions contested over 72 holes, except for developmental tours (like the Abema TV Tour, the Alps Golf Tour, or the Europro Tour, among others) which are permitted to be 54 hole events.


3. An open annual qualifying school held before the start of each season.


4. A field size on average of 75 players over the course of the season.


5. a 36-hole cut, whether playing 54 or 72 holes.


6. A clear opportunity to progress to a full member tour, that is, to one of the six members of the International Federation of PGA Tours.


7. Reasonable access for local and regional players (i.e. Monday qualifiers) at each of its tournaments.


Obviously not every PGA tour sanctioned event meets all of these, but on the whole, the Tours receiving points are compliant, with some specific exemptions for certain events.  LIV, on the other hand, fails to meet pretty much every single one.  It's one thing to ask for a certain event to get points despite not meeting all of the criteria.  LIV wants all of its events to get points despite not meeting ANY of the criteria, except maybe #1 and #6, which may be inapplicable if they consider themselves a premier tour.


You can argue whether these rules are arbitrary, or in need of amending, or whatever, but they exist (allegedly) , and LIV has made virtually no effort to comply with them.  There's also no evidence of unfair treatment, despite LIV's claims of bias inherent in the governing board.  For me, the static nature of the Tour is a problem.  We can all judge how good the LIV guys are vs. PGA Tour guys because we have a lot of recent results to use for comparison's sake.  What about five years from now?  If you lose your game on the PGA Tour, you play your way off, and vice versa.  LIV guys can just suck and cash seven figure checks because they got randomly assigned to a good "team" (which is also a dumb concept, IMO). 

[A.G._Crockett]

The NBA could change to three quarters and no results would change. They’d just play hard earlier.

So you're saying depth and foul trouble don't matter in the NBA?  Interesting.  I coached basketball for a long, long time, though never in the NBA, of course, and I always found the fourth quarter to be a test of those things, among others.

[A.G._Crockett]

Pointing out (correctly) that final round and playoff formats have changed over the years, and then using that to say that 72 holes of stroke play is “arbitrary” requires a leap of logic over the Grand Canyon.  72 holes has been THE standard in professional golf for longer than any of us have been alive; that’s not “arbitrary”.

Within the last 2 decades the pga tour has held 90 hole stroke play events, 126 hole match play events, Stableford events, and 2 man team events. 72 stroke play may be common, but it is not the only standard.

The playoff formats were changed for TV, and we could argue the merits of that endlessly. But that is quite different from moving from 72 holes over 4 days to 54 holes over 3 days.

Is it? Professional Golf as it exist today is primarily an entertainment product. We all like to believe tournaments are pillars of pure sport and competition, but outside of the majors we all know that's not true. Even then the majors are a balance between pure competition and entertainment spectacle. An entertainment product that has been continuously tuned and tweaked for broad consumption. So if a 36 hole Saturday finish in a major is moved to 18 Saturday and 18 Sunday and if an 18 hole playoff is shortened to sudden death or a short series of holes all in the name of providing a better entertainment product, then why is it so far fetched to think LIV's format is not based on the same logic, or that logic is flawed?

One of the really odd things about this debate ON THIS SITE is that little or no attention is being paid to the shotgun start.  I think all of us SHOULD understand that even a split tee start is problematic in terms of every player playing the same golf course, but a shotgun is well beyond that.  To think that any sequence of holes is going to be the same as any other sequence of holes is just silly, and every person on a golf course architecture sire knows that.  Or should…

This is a continuation of golf being presented for entertainment first. If one was going to watch the entirety of a LIV tournament it would take them ~15 hours over 3 days. If one was going to attempt to watch the entirety of a PGA Tour event it would take them more than 3 times as long. The shotgun allow the event to be condensed in a way that afford more complete viewership.

The shotgun format has virtually zero bearing on the leaderboard during the first 2 days. And any gripe would be similar, if not less impactful, than the morning/afternoon split you see during Thur/Fri tee times on the PGA tour. There is some gripe to the format impacting the last day, but its still also very little. The leaders still tee off on 1, 2nd place group tees off on 2, 3rd place on 3, etc... So for 17 holes you're still watching the leaders play a hole immediately after the chasers did. The only difference is what happens with the the players playing different 18th holes. But this is an area where the broadcast could do a good job of walking the viewer through the challenge faced by one player finishing up on 18 and another finishing up on 1. Especially being that both players have already played the other hole during their round. At that point you could easily speak to how hard the hole is playing on the day and how the other leader played it, to better frame the current action.

But, if viewers are unable to adapt, one modification I could see being made to the format in this regard is for the final day have the last 4 or 5 tee times all starting on 1 in sequence, and the last place 3 some starting on 12. That way the top 12-15 players would play in the sequence we're accustom to, but the overall broadcast time is still kept manageable.

Regardless. There is a significant amount of "they can't do that because that's not the way it's been done" mentality around the format, which simply isn't true. The format that golf is played under has and will continue to change. Assuming it can not change or discrediting any change is short sided.

Ben,
You are incorrect, and you are welcome to go the OWGR website and read it for yourself.  Neither I nor anybody else has ever asserted that 72 holes with a 36 hole cut is the ONLY way that tournament golf is played, and the only format for which ranking points are awarded.
But if you are claiming that 72/36 is NOT the standard you are just wrong, and if you are claiming that somehow 54/0 is comparable, you are more than wrong.  Sorry.

[Ken Moum]

Now it appears that the Great Narcissist is claiming that Scheffler isn't the no. 1 player in the world.


He thinks Dustin and Cam are better.


https://www.golfwrx.com/695258/greg-norman-makes-bold-claim-over-over-liv-duo-disrespecting-scottie-scheffler-in-the-process/

[Dave Doxey]

A top skilled golfer is a top skilled golfer, regardless of which tour he plays on.  Pretending otherwise is silly.

[A.G._Crockett]

A top skilled golfer is a top skilled golfer, regardless of which tour he plays on.  Pretending otherwise is silly.

Who is saying that the golfers aren’t skilled?


For purposes of ranking points, the FORMAT, not the players, is the issue.


That’s not a judgment call about depth of field or anything else; they are asking for VERY large exceptions to the OWGR standards, and not just the number of holes. Pretending otherwise is silly.

[John Kavanaugh]

The NBA could change to three quarters and no results would change. They’d just play hard earlier.

So you're saying depth and foul trouble don't matter in the NBA?  Interesting.  I coached basketball for a long, long time, though never in the NBA, of course, and I always found the fourth quarter to be a test of those things, among others.

You have to respect that rare trait that distinguishes the difference between winners, maintainers and losers. 12 fewer minutes will not elevate a pretender.

[Ben Hollerbach]

Ben,
You are incorrect, and you are welcome to go the OWGR website and read it for yourself.  Neither I nor anybody else has ever asserted that 72 holes with a 36 hole cut is the ONLY way that tournament golf is played, and the only format for which ranking points are awarded.
But if you are claiming that 72/36 is NOT the standard you are just wrong, and if you are claiming that somehow 54/0 is comparable, you are more than wrong.  Sorry.

A.G.
I feel like this point is worth reiterating:

There is a significant amount of "they can't do that because that's not the way it's been done" mentality around the format, which simply isn't true.

This seems to be where you're head is living these days. Especially when reading your reply to Peter's 90 holes question.

My participation in this thread was started on this notion that how things are done today are not the only way they could be done.  While the current structure of the OWGR does not mesh with what LIV has started with, I don't see where either is set in stone, especially since LIV is operating in its infancy and the OWGR very recently changed how it operates.

[Kalen Braley]

Ben,
You are incorrect, and you are welcome to go the OWGR website and read it for yourself.  Neither I nor anybody else has ever asserted that 72 holes with a 36 hole cut is the ONLY way that tournament golf is played, and the only format for which ranking points are awarded.
But if you are claiming that 72/36 is NOT the standard you are just wrong, and if you are claiming that somehow 54/0 is comparable, you are more than wrong.  Sorry.

A.G.
I feel like this point is worth reiterating:

There is a significant amount of "they can't do that because that's not the way it's been done" mentality around the format, which simply isn't true.

This seems to be where you're head is living these days. Especially when reading your reply to Peter's 90 holes question.

My participation in this thread was started on this notion that how things are done today are not the only way they could be done.  While the current structure of the OWGR does not mesh with what LIV has started with, I don't see where either is set in stone, especially since LIV is operating in its infancy and the OWGR very recently changed how it operates.

Ben,

I read it differently.  I see it as how to run an event with integrity based on past lessons learned.

Its been very clear from the start that LIV is about the money and grudges, not the integrity of the actual golf tournaments.

[John Kavanaugh]

Its been very clear from the start that LIV is about the money and grudges, not the integrity of the actual golf tournaments.

Please explain without involving politics. You said very clear.

[Bruce Katona]

"Just got a Four Aces tattoo on my virtual ass."

JK:

Are you raising funds through NFT sales for your next virtual one?  I'd love to see the NFT mock-up!

[JLahrman]

I have minor issues with things like 54 holes, no cut, no spots for local players.  I have a big problem with LIV's lack of discernible criteria for qualification.  I can turn on a PGA Tour event, and despite a handful of sponsors' exemptions, I know that every player teeing it up earned their spot in the field under the criteria established by the Tour.  You can argue that the Tour should change it's rules, that it allows too many older players in because of life memberships, or other earnings based exemptions.  There's a good argument to be made that a non-competitive Davis Love should not be in PGA Tour fields.  But the fact is that he has qualified under the Tour's rules. Meanwhile, Chase Koepka and Peter Uihlein have had years to prove that they do not belong in top tier competitive golf tournaments.  I don't know anyone getting into PGA Tour events based on who is in their family.  Combine that with small fields, which means much of the field is made up of guys who simply couldn't qualify for the PGA Tour, and, well, I'm not that impressed that Cam Smith and DJ can beat 12-15 good players and a bunch of tomato cans.

This point is a good one and maybe got lost on the bottom of the first page. To get off the ground, I get that LIV had to take who they could. But look at a guy like Chase Koepka. He had one year on the European Tour (2018) where he lost his card. In 2019 he went back to the Challenge Tour but didn't play well. He was unable to qualify for the Korn Ferry Tour in 2020 or 2021. Does anybody think he would be a LIV golfer today if LIV hadn't been trying to lure a certain brother of his? I can barely break 100 right now. But if it turned out that I was a good friend of Cameron Young, could I be playing the LIV Tour and earning OWGR points each event for finishing last?

[John Kavanaugh]

Can we stop pretending that there isn't already an algorithm that determines the best golfers in the world? It would be a tool worth creating in determining how much and who to sponsor.

[Steve Lang]

Can we stop pretending that there isn't already an algorithm that determines the best golfers in the world? It would be a tool worth creating in determining how much and who to sponsor.

JK you can be sure that any "O" in the acronym for it stands for "Official"

[A.G._Crockett]

The NBA could change to three quarters and no results would change. They’d just play hard earlier.

So you're saying depth and foul trouble don't matter in the NBA?  Interesting.  I coached basketball for a long, long time, though never in the NBA, of course, and I always found the fourth quarter to be a test of those things, among others.

You have to respect that rare trait that distinguishes the difference between winners, maintainers and losers. 12 fewer minutes will not elevate a pretender.

I have absolutely no idea what this gibberish means.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

All that being said it seems the board can say any event they want gets points as the Chevron World Challenge earned points with no cut, and very limited field.

Tiger's event:

• Is a PGA Tour sanctioned event.
• Has players who EARN their way into it. It used to be whomever Tiger invited, but now it's the top 18 golfers plus two sponsor's exemptions, I believe.
• Is 72 holes.

The Tour Championship, Tournament of Champions, etc. are all smaller fields, too. But the players earned their way into them.

LIV is, from what many seem to believe, failing on several fronts.

• There's no qualifying for LIV events, or the Tour.
• There is no cut.
• They play only 54 holes (this alone is not a disqualified, except that they're not a developmental tour).
• They haven't been in operation for a year+.

[Tim_Cronin]

I love when people get so intense about a subject they believe capital letters will carry the point. But I digress.

Last night I wondered if the Sagarin Golf Rankings still exist and the answer is yes. (They're on Golfweek's web site.)


The men's pro rankings include LIV Golf (though the boilerplate explaining the methodology hasn't been updated yet; you can tell because tournaments are ranked as well as players and the LIV tournaments are in there).


How it works, from Golfweek: Jeff Sagarin's rating system is based on a mathematical formula that uses a player's won-lost-tied record against other players when they play on the same course on the same day, and the stroke differential between those players, then links all players to one another based on common opponents. The ratings give an indication of who is playing well over the past 52 weeks.
Here are the top 10s in OWGR and Sagarin, as posted Sept. 20:


       OWGR           Sagarin
  1  Scheffler       McIlroy
  2  McIlroy         Rahm
  3  Smith           Cantlay
  4  Cantlay         Smith
  5  Schauffele     Scheffler
  6  Rahm            Shauffele
  7  Thomas        Thomas
  8  Zalatoris       Fitzpatrick
  9  Morikawa      Matsuyama
10  Hovland        Homa


Tournament Rankings (lower number the better) going back this season. No space between tournaments played in the same week:


Fortinet                 70.88
LIV Chicago           70.63


BMW PGA              71.26
Korn Ferry Champ  71.65


LIV Boston             70.66


PGA Tour Champ.   68.74 (top-rated tournament on a list of over 175 across all tours this year)


BMW Ch (Western) 69.30


FedEx St. Jude       69.86


Wyndham              71.05


LIV Bedminster      70.82
Rocket Mortgage    71.05


3M Open               71.77


British Open          70.66


LIV Portland          71.03
John Deere            71.74


U.S. Open             70.66


LIV London           71.40
Canadian Open      71.74


Memorial               70.19


PGA Championship 70.61


The Masters           70.16


To my surprise, LIV's five tournaments so far have had a better ranking than the five PGA Tour tournaments they have gone up against. The LIV tournament ranking has also improved from week to week as more players have been signed.


Make of it what you will.