Three years after introducing the Power Method, the World Amateur Golf Ranking has made two meaningful changes to its formula in search of reaching a proper balance.
As of this week, the WAGR has lowered the value of performance in professional events, slashing its power calculation for those tournaments by a third. The system is also now set to be more punishing toward players who have poor finishes against strong competition.
One of the criticisms of the WAGR in recent years is that players can rise through the rankings simply by competing against professional fields. A similar complaint has been made about top-tier amateur tournaments that have awarded ample points to competitors far down the leaderboard, which has failed to create any sense of risk for poor play.
Because of those factors, the USGA and R&A noticed players becoming more resistant to entering local or regional competition – where a bad result could be harmful toward their ranking – and more focused on entering top-tier amateur events or qualifying for professional tournaments. From gathering feedback, the governing bodies observed that players often were doing this simply to protect their ranking. In many cases, it was felt that players have tried to compete in events beyond their current skillset rather than cutting their teeth at the local level.
The unhealthy trend meant that some necessary tweaks needed to be made to the Power Method, a system that assigns numeric ratings to players and tournaments based on field strength and results.
“We decided to pull back the strength of professional events so that they were closer to what a winner would have received in the pre-Power Method,” Ross Galarneault, the director of championship scoring for the USGA, told Global Golf Post. “It’s not all the way back, but it’s a lot closer to it. To give you a rough estimate, in the old system, a winner of a professional major or tour event might get somewhere around 44 points as a reward. And now we’re probably looking somewhere in the low 50s. So we went from being in possibly the 70-point category the past few years to now down to the low 50s with the professional calculation change.
“Along with that, the new distribution curve for points is more of an upside-down bell curve as opposed to a flat distribution. It drops down so that if you end up in last place, the number of points you’re going to get is significantly less than the middle of the field, whereas before, it was just a little bit less. We think that now this puts a little bit more jeopardy into play.”
For a real-life example of what this means, take the case of U.S. Amateur winner Sam Bennett. In this previous iteration of the Power Method, he received more than 12 points for missing the cut in the PGA Tour’s Arnold Palmer Invitational last year, a tournament in which he shot 85 in the second round and did not perform well.
"It’s hard to equate starting in a Korn Ferry Tour event versus a South African Tour event versus a Japan Tour event, so it is incredibly challenging to weigh those events against each other."
Andy Priest
But Bennett still earned more points for that missed cut than he did for finishing runner-up in a college tournament earlier in the year, or for a top-10 finish in the NCAA Championship that spring.
Bennett is one of the top amateurs in the world, but that general line of thinking can be extrapolated to players of varying calibers worldwide. Amateur golf in the U.S. is robust enough to stand alone, but some areas of the world don’t have the same access to quality amateur golf and have to play against professionals. That has made it difficult to find a formula that is fair to everyone involved.
“It’s hard to equate starting in a Korn Ferry Tour event versus a South African Tour event versus a Japan Tour event, so it is incredibly challenging to weigh those events against each other,” said Andy Priest, executive director of the Southern Golf Association. “But I do think that there was a little bit of an overstatement maybe for some of those events where the amateurs, especially during COVID, were able to just tee it up in professional events and earn a very, very high WAGR ranking because of that.”
Galarneault and Priest made the point that local state competition may now become a better option for players looking to improve their ranking. A strong performance in a smaller local event will now likely be worth more points than a poor performance in a professional or top-tier amateur tournament.
“I think some of these players can now look and say, ‘Hey, if I play my state amateur, I might be able to do better as far as point values go,” Priest said.
Galarneault added: “If you were to take a look at the winning share for a very small, very weak event, and say that’s somewhere around seven or eight points … if someone earned that many points for all their finishes, that’s going to get them in the top 200, maybe 250, of either the men’s or women’s rankings. And again, think about winning only weak events and still being a top-200 player. To us, you know, that’s OK. But it really doesn’t mean anything until you go step up to play in those stronger events. And that’s where you really figure out what’s going to happen.”
Step up to play in bigger tournaments and your ranking is on the line. It adds a sense of volatility.
Priest voiced his support of the changes and indicated that feedback from those in the amateur game has been overwhelmingly positive to this point. John Ranslem, the executive director of the Southwestern Golf Association, was among that group.
“The WAGR is definitely in the best place it’s been in the last few years,” Ranslem said, adding that the Power Method has been a substantial improvement on the previous system that ranked event strength by letter grades and struggled to show the proper context of how events related to one another.
The new system will take time to show exact consequences, but Galarneault believes the women’s game will be more impacted than the men’s because there are more female amateurs playing in professional events. Regardless of whether it’s men or women, Galarneault and the governing bodies are hoping all players take a deeper look at which events to enter.
“Hopefully we’re going to see some behavior changes,” Galarneault said. “And if that doesn't happen, we’ll have to evaluate the numbers. We take a long look at a lot of statistics and do tables and evaluations to try to figure out what is the right approach to identify the top players globally.
“We think these changes are going to be a good step forward in just fine-tuning what we’re doing. Honestly, we were pretty happy with the change to the Power Method. And that’s why there weren’t wholesale changes. We’re just kind of addressing a few areas that we had some minor concerns about, and we think it’s going to help the game and events at all levels by these adjustments.”
Galarneault said the changes were announced during the golf coaches convention in December, and some of the immediate feedback was promising.
“A few of the people that wanted to criticize stuff for us, all of a sudden when they realized what the changes were, they saw that it fixed the problem they were talking about,” Galarneault said.
For those keeping score, a few other minor changes were made to the WAGR.
Now, 18-hole stroke play qualifying for match play will count in determining the power of an event, as well as receiving points and a divisor. Additionally, round-robin or “pod” match play similar to the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play event also will count before the knockout rounds.
Also, there had been a COVID-related protection for international events that had a pre-pandemic power greater than 400. The WAGR committee had allowed those tournaments to stay at a minimum of 80 percent of their original power despite travel restrictions making it difficult or impossible for international competitors to play. That provision has been removed because travel restrictions are no longer an issue.
Lastly, there will be no more player event removals. Previously, a player could appeal for event removals – meaning the result would not be included in his or her ranking – in the case of exceptional circumstances. That meant something beyond the scope of being hurt or sick.
“Unfortunately, several dozen appeals were still received for event removal from players believing their injury or illness was an exceptional circumstance,” the USGA said in a release. “To align more closely with the professional golf ranking, from 1 January 2023, no event results will be removed from player records for any reason.”
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Top: Under the previous points method, Sam Bennett earned more points for missing the cut at the 2022 Arnold Palmer Invitational than he did for a top-10 finish in the NCAA Championship.
David Cannon, Getty Images