Not another rankings system

Welcome to the PGATA Stats blog where I’ll be covering the analytical side of golf relating to the Aussie tour and golf in general. I don’t want to go too hard, too early so this first article will diving a little deeper into the new rankings system that features on this website. You can see how the rankings are calculated here. I would recommend reading that page before this blog post if you are interested in these rankings.

No rankings system is perfect, we can easily see that with the current OWGR with many LIV players falling outside the top 100. WAGR has its own problems and has become even easier to game since their strength of field calculations changed in 2023, but that’s for another article. Today I will explore some of the flaws in the system I have created.

Since there haven’t been any meaningful statistics published (until now), unless I have been scrolling the whole leaderboard every event, as a fan of the Aussie tour I have found it difficult to follow who is and isn’t playing well. Sometimes a lesser-known player winning an event is a surprise until you jump back into past events and see they have made every cut for the past month with multiple top 20s. The Order of Merit rankings are discussed and promoted often by the tour, but because of the larger weighting of points awarded at the top end of these events, players that are high on the OOM rankings have already had a very strong finish if not already won an event. As with every rankings system having flaws, the OOM is highly skewed by the bigger events where double, triple or quadruple points are awarded. I have used OOM points as a base in the rankings on PGATA Stats, but have applied a multiplier based on the strength of field (SoF) for each event.

For example, the VIC Open awards double OOM points in comparison to the majority of tour events, but it is obviously not twice as difficult to earn those points. This means players that do well in these events are naturally ranked higher on the OOM Leaderboard than they would be with a SoF calculation. This is the case on all tours as marquee events will always award more points than a regular event, however other tours have meaningful statistics where player performance can be easily viewed by the casual fan and players alike.

This is only a very small dataset but using tour data from 2022/23 season onwards, the VIC Open is about 5% stronger than a standard PGATA event, and (perhaps surprisingly) about 10% weaker than a co-sanctioned event with the WPGA. These figures are derived by taking the previous season’s OOM top 50 and calculating the average number of points earned in each event. I would expect the multi-gender events to be stronger than a regular event using this formula as they feature very similar male players with larger fields which logically equals higher difficulty. However in season 2023/24, three of these multi-gender events were won by Kazuma Kobori who turned professional mid-season and did not feature in the previous season’s top 50. With Kazuma’s victories, coupled with some WPGA players having high finishes, there are less points available for those players that determine the SoF calculations in this rankings system. This might a be a flaw in the system, but as I’ll be using the past three season’s worth of events (post season 2024/25) I expect these flaws to “even out.” A good example of this is the opening event of season 2024/25 which has just concluded on the weekend.

I have split tour events into their own categories based on OOM points awarded and expected difficulty of those events. Our blue-chip events, the Australian Open and Australian PGA are the hardest events and used together to calculate SoF. On average, the top 50 from the previous season earn 13.29 OOM points in these events. This is compared to 17.41 OOM points earned per event over the whole season. Even when an extra 4x points are awarded, players are expected to earn less than your typical tour event. This goes to show how strong these fields are and rankings points are awarded at a higher rate than even the 4x OOM multiplier.

The PNG Open was played last season for the first time since 2019, and came in comfortably as the easiest event of the past two seasons. This was likely due to the event commencing only a month after the end of the previous season, and no tour event to be played for the following three months. Only nine players from the top 50 made the trip which was the lowest amount in the two seasons (next lowest was 16 in the 2023 NZ PGA). Even with 75% of OOM points awarded, of the nine players used in calculations that contested the event, an average of 27.31 points were earned. Lachie Barker, the eventual winner, was not used in SoF calculations so there was potential for an even higher average. As a result of this low field strength, the 2023 PNG Open has been placed in its own category as to not affect the weighting of regular tour events.

This year’s PNG Open looked much closer to a regular tour event with 17 players from the top 50 contesting - these players earned an average of 11.10 OOM points. Prior to this event, standard tour events (band 1, male only) averaged 15.52 OOM points per player. With the 2024 PNG Open added, the average points earned moves from 15.52, down to 15.24. The total average over all events moves from 17.41, down to 17.22.

17.22 / 15.24 = 1.13.

Player’s OOM points earned in the PNG open are then multiplied by 1.13 to determine their Rankings Points.

With the first event of the new season completed, events from previous seasons will begin to decay -

• As there were 18 events last year, Rankings Points from event 1 of season 2023/24 (PNG Open) is now applied at 94.74% (100%- (1/19)). As events are completed this season, events from the previous season will decrease by approximately 5.26%. After the second event of the new season is completed, Rankings Points from the 2023 PNG Open will be applied at 89.47%, the 2023 WA Open at 94.74%, and so on.

• Events from season 2022/23 have already decayed based on which order the events were played. Event 1 from this season (WA Open) is now worth 0.00%, and every event thereafter increases by 6.25% (1/16). Each event will decrease by this figure as this season’s events are completed.

With his win in the PNG Open over the weekend, William Bruyeres earned a total of 214.69 Rankings Points (190 x 1.13) and moves up 71 positions from 104th to 33rd. Other big moves include James Conran up 46 spots from 94th to 48th, and Peter Cooke up 36 from 126th to 90th. Kazuma Kobori and David Micheluzzi remain the twin towers of the PGATA.

I hope this new systems gives us all a better idea of how players are performing and we can see some up-and-comers move there way up the list!