Precisely one year ago, Scottie Scheffler won The Players Championship and crossed into rarefied "+2.5 strokes-gained skill" territory. For players not named Tiger Woods, sustaining a +2.5 (or better) skill rating has proven difficult.

At the time, we wrote the following:

"Scheffler’s game appears rock solid right now, and it’s hard to imagine his game falling off anytime soon. But that’s also how it likely felt for most of the players included in the plot above. Success is fleeting in golf, and if history is any indication Scheffler’s time at the top will be shorter than we think."

Unlike his (non-Tiger) peers, Scottie has not regressed in the months following the +2.5 "peak": his latest skill rating is +2.6.

What is most impressive about this sustained level of performance is that Scheffler has lost 0.3 strokes per round putting in the last year. If Scottie can sort the putter out—which is a big if—we may have found the first player since Tiger Woods that can live comfortably above the +2.5 skill mark.

(You may have noticed that there are more players in the +2.5 skill plot from a year ago; this is because we've changed our annual SG baselines slightly, and are applying a bit more regression in the rankings model.)

Thoughts on Rankings

Golf rankings were a hot topic again last week after LIV officially withdrew their application to be incorporated into the OWGR system. The current OWGR rankings are, of course, flawed in a basic sense because they exclude LIV golfers, but we believe their method for ranking golfers remains solid.

Amid the OWGR criticism, some people (and bots) have pointed to our rankings as a potential alternative. While we think our rankings are certainly useful for some things, we also think there are too many obvious downsides to scoring-based systems to use them as an official ranking tool.

We see 3 main issues:

Note: we define a scoring-based ranking system as one where the only inputs are player scores and an identifier for the tournament/round where a score was shot. In the simplest setup, the same set of golfers play the same events, and ranking is determined by average score.

1. Winning isn’t rewarded enough and bad performances are penalized too much
Points-based systems reward players disproportionately for great play (especially winning) and set a floor for bad play (0 points). Scoring-based systems don’t reward winning at all—holing a 20-foot putt to win a major championship is worth the same as any other 20-footer—and there is no limit to how much a single round can hurt a player’s ranking. In theory, this could create a situation where a player wins all 4 majors in a season and yet is not the number 1 ranked player (Brooks Koepka has never been higher than 4th in our rankings). At the end of the day professional golf is primarily about winning tournaments, and the official ranking system should reflect that.

2. Professional golf operates at the tournament-level, while scoring-based systems operate at the round-level
Earnings, points, and how we look at seasons and careers are all a function of a golfer’s tournament results. No prizes are given out to the first-round leader. Consequently, an official ranking system should also function at the tournament-level. Scoring-based systems don’t do this: if two players have the same scoring average then they will get the same ranking, regardless of their respective tournament finishes. Last weekend at the API, Jake Knapp made the cut while Adam Schenk missed it, but Knapp’s performance would be treated as worse than Schenk’s in a score-based system due to his terrible 3rd round. Analyzing performances this way makes sense for an objective evaluation of golfer skill, but probably isn’t desirable in an official ranking system.

3. They create bad incentives for players looking to preserve their ranking position
Imagine you are comfortably inside of an important ranking cutoff that will be applied in a few weeks. In a scoring-based system, the fact there is no floor to a player’s evaluation each week incentivizes you to sit out the remaining events before the cutoff. (In the OWGR system this incentive can exist as well—due to the divisor—but to a much smaller degree.) Even without a deadline looming, players would be incentivized to WD mid-round to avoid posting a big number that negatively affects their ranking.

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Any ranking system will leave some things to be desired. The current OWGR method uses a scoring-based system to determine a tournament’s field strength and total point allocation, and then rewards points based on a player’s finish position—which, in theory, uses the best features of scoring and points-based systems. Last year we did a brief analysis of the fairness of the new OWGR and the results looked pretty good. There are still areas that their system struggles with, like its treatment of small fields, but these are things that can be tweaked. We should not be so quick to throw the entire OWGR project under the bus because LIV—an intentional disruptor—is not getting ranking points.

Traffic Jam

Last week we fully covered five tournaments, a first for us.

Here is how our users’ attention was divided amongst those 5 tournaments throughout the week, in terms of player profile page views:

We last looked at LIV-related traffic data in October, and it seems like things haven't improved since then. Players in LIV Hong Kong did have slightly more profile views on a per player basis than Puerto Rico, but they were lapped by players in the API. Joaquin Niemann had the most profile page views of any LIV player with a 0.7% share (47th most), slotted right between… Stephan Jaeger and Taylor Moore.

A lot of our page views are driven by betting and fantasy interest, but not all of them: Joel Dahmen was ranked 109th in page views from Monday-Tuesday, but ranked 14th from Wednesday-Sunday. What changed? Dahmen had a forgettable week at the Puerto Rico Open (T49th), but the second season of Netflix’s Full Swing was released on Wednesday which, presumably, drove his big traffic boost.

Week That Was

Winner	Event	True SG	xWin
S. Scheffler	PGA — Arnold Palmer	+5.01	0.993
M. Manassero	DPT — Jonsson Workwear	+2.85	0.033
A. Ancer	LIV — Hong Kong	+2.56	0.003
B. Garnett	PGA — Puerto Rico	+1.99	0.001
T. Dickson	KFT — Chile Classic	+1.22	0.0
J. Durant	SNR — Cologuard Classic	+0.46	0.0

Explainers: True SG, xWins

Scheffler gained 5 (adjusted) strokes per round en route to his runaway win at the API. It’s the best event-level SG performance we've seen since Wyndam Clark at the ‘23 Wells Fargo.

Matteo Manassero returned to the winner’s circle on the DP World Tour after more than a decade away. It’s a great story, but probably worth noting that the strength of the field he beat was similar to a typical KFT event.

The leaderboard at LIV Hong Kong was very bunched, with just 5 strokes separating the top 20 golfers (in a field of 54); this explains why Ancer’s True SG and xWin marks are so low.

Site Updates

Two weeks off from the newsletter means some updates to datagolf.com!

This time we chose to revamp the trend table—a page highlighting which players have been trending up (or down) over their most recent 20 rounds. The top of the current trend table is shown below:

You can also see how players are trending relative to their baseline (far-right column). A quick sort will bring good news for longstanding holders of #HogeCoin.