For a few years, we have been wanting to publish a new golf ranking system. We have named this system “Shots to 1”. As far as we are aware, it is the most extensive golf ranking system in the world and the first ever strokes-based women’s world ranking. It shows how many shots (strokes if you prefer!) an individual player needs to gain each round in order to become world number one. We have previously written a brief summary of how our rankings differ from other available ranking systems.
Ranking every elite golfer in the world is a tough job. For what it’s worth, the official men’s and women’s rankings do a good job of rewarding good performances with exemptions into the best tournaments. Is that the sole job of rankings system? Is it to simply ensure good play is rewarded? Perhaps. Or should it consider as much data as possible to ensure the best players play in the best tournaments? They may sound the same, but we can guarantee that the top 50 in the world rankings is never the 50 best players in the world. We will never be able to unequivocally say who are the best 50 players in the world but over vast amounts of data, we can look into how close our ranking matches up to future performance. In a fantasy world, if we could get to the stage of saying with 100% certainty that these 50 golfers are without any doubt, the best 50 in the world, would a tournament organiser want them in their tournament? Of course! With that in mind, we hope to run a few different experiments to see what merits each ranking system has and how we can improve our rankings and be open about how we did it and the results.
Lets start with the current version of our rankings. The first version of our men’s rankings uses a strokes-gained based system which, we believe, is very similar to the strokes-gained world rating which was recently incorporated into the men’s world rankings. The main difference is that our rankings include as many tournaments as we can find. That includes qualifying tournaments such Monday Qualifiers and the qualifying schools of all the major tours. Secondly, we include all the data that we can find on the internet. This obviously includes LIV golf but also includes senior tours and regional tours. A tournament is not automatically accepted into the rankings because it is a designated world ranking event. Nevertheless, because we include thousands more tournaments than the OWGR, we also have enough overlap to include thousands of amateur events. This means that a college golfer who has never played a professional event, can be ranked against touring professional golfers. A minimum threshold of players in each tournament must already have a Strokes-to-1 ranking in order for that tournament to be accepted into the rankings database. We are working hard to find as much data as possible.
Our women’s rankings is very similar to the men’s ranking. It also includes minor tours, qualifers, amateur events and many satellite tours that are not in the Rolex Rankings. As far as we can tell, the Rolex Ranking simply uses a 2-year average to calculate their rankings. This has many flaws that are not worth mentioning! However, for now, we will also use a 2-year-average to show how different the ranking would look if they used a strokes-based system.
One small note is that we have chosen to reference our strokes-based rankings against the world number one. The world rankings, PGA Tour and datagolf reference their strokes-based rankings against the average PGA Tour player. This means that strokes gained stats can be more easily referenced from year-to-year since the average PGA Tour is unlikely to change much year-to-year. However, the best player in the world can vary week-to-week. The two different methods can be easily converted form one into the other, but we know from experience mixing positive and negative numbers makes it a lot less intuitive no matter how simple it seems. We now see good golf statistics in the day-to-day television coverage thanks to Mark Broadie. But we really wish he didn’t use the average PGA Tour player and have to minus a negative number to show the total shots taken by a player is higher.
