Mark, I completely agree, and of course Cardinal rankings should be in a red guide.
I wonder if Tom would resuscitate the confidential guide as a licensed property, or do a new Doak guide, as an antidote and alternative source of rankings. Let the owners and operators fret over getting their stars when the Doak rater team shows up unannounced for the biennial re-rating.
If there's one thing truly startling about the magazine lists is how stable the ratings are. Most courses move little, up or down. The ratings are largely calcified, meaning there is little incentive to change or improve. This is a side effect of the ordinal rankings derived from tranches. You have to figure that most of the raters aren't revisiting most courses most cycles, so a course that is a rater's 65 but isn't seen in a cycle isn't likely to move up to 49, or down to 76, so no change.
On a cardinal ranking, like the Doak scale, there is no artificial limit on the number of courses at any level. And if the rankings are revisited each cycle, there's no inertia from the past carrying the course along. That would have 2 beneficial consequences.
1) Consumers would know that since Courses would get a look every cycle, that changes good and bad were reflected in the rankings, and
2) Courses who wanted to get more stars/points would know they would get a look, and reward, the next cycle
Jim, is there a way to estimate the probability that each course is a 0, 1, 2, or 3?
Dave