OWGR Files: Scott Moving To No. 1 This Week By Not Playing

Adam Scott was grilled about scoreboard watching last week at The Players...to see if he would get that elusive T16 or better that would vault him to No. 1 in the world. Kind of funny when you think about it.

He really didn't care, and not because he wouldn't be honored. I'm guessing it's just hard to get excited about algorithms when you have a life like Scott's.

Doug Ferguson says the algorithms will vault Scott to No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking this week while Scott is not playing, and it's certainly not the first time this has happened. The fifth, to be exact.

Scott had four mathematical chances over the last two months to replace Tiger Woods at No. 1 in the world. His best chance was to win at Bay Hill, only he couldn’t hold a seven-shot lead on the weekend. His most recent opportunity was The Players Championship, where he would have needed a 68 on Sunday. He closed with a 73.

And now that he has a week off, Scott will go to No. 1.

It won’t be official until next week, but here’s what we know. Woods keeps losing points without being able to replace them because he is recovering from back surgery and has not played a tournament in more than two months. Scott will move past Woods this week, and the field at the Byron Nelson Championship is not strong enough that Matt Kuchar could surpass them even if he were to win.

Is it awkward? Sure.

Unprecedented? Not even close.

Ferguson goes on to dig up the past No. 1 ascensions and they're pretty strange.

Comments

[tlavin]

Poetic, isn't it?

[elf]

Golf is played every week, not every player plays every week, therefore guys are going to move around in the rankings on weeks they don't play. People getting up in arms about this is really sort of dumb.

Now you can argue about whether it should be an average: basically how good are you when you show up vs a straight points accumulation which rewards playing more often with worse results. But does have the advantage of not allowing you to move up when you're not playing.

You could also question the minimum divisor. Basically regardless of how few tournaments you've played your pts total will be divided by at least 40. Without the minimum divisor Tiger would still have nearly a full pt lead on Adam. Of course the player that the minimum divisor really hurts right now is JB Holmes, who is returning from injury & would be close to a US Open spot if his real divisor was used (34) vs the minimum divisor.

Oh and all of this sort of ignores the fact that Adam has played pretty mediocre this year. He's actually lost 1.5 pts on his rankings average from the start of the year, but with Tiger not playing he'll take over #1 anyways.

[BrianS]

@Elf - I agree that this is not an issue, and it is totally reasonable given the point system. And the fact is, Tiger should certainly be going down in the rankings, given the fact that he is not actually playing competitive golf. I have no problem with the idea of a minimum divisor (I don't know if 40 is the right number ), you should demonstrate ability over something of a long period of time. If you want to start at 0 each January, I see the appeal to that, but is that really accurate ? Tiger won 5 last year, and it seems to me that on January 1, he should have been #1, and so on down the list based on the previous year.

[elf]

@BrianS for any average you clearly need a minimum divisor, for general statistics purposes n of 20 is considered large enough to start treating is as a normal distribution, so that is where I would set the minimum. If you have a 20 event hot streak, um good for you.

And yes Tiger should clearly be seeing his avg drop, and it is as points fall off. Whether he should move down the rankings has more to do with others. To whit Tiger's real avg right now is 8.9, which is reasonably clear of Adam's 7.9, but Adam started the year at 9.4. So the reason that Tiger is still no1 (& would be with his real divisor being used) is more due to Adam's play tailing off, than him not losing points.

[Pasaplayer]

Hardly like the standings in the NL West. Now that I can follow. Go Giants!

If you can't make it that simple, then you've lost me.