We've talked here a lot about the bias in the Official World Golf Rankings, the structure of the FedEx Cup, and how to rank players and tournaments.  That in mind, I started tinkering with a ranking system for the PGA Tour that could accomplish the following:

1. Properly weight tournaments by their value and field depth
2. Penalize players for not getting closer to the leader
3. Be easy to understand

And here's my first crack at it.  I gathered data from every stroke play, non-major event so far - where players finished in a tournament by both relationship to par and relationship to each other.  Then, I applied my system.

First, the winner received a certain number of points in accordance with the tiers that I created in my piece that ranked the PGA Tour schedule.  Ultimately, that meant that each tournament winner would get a different amount of points based on the event - not the players in the field, per se.  This is because winning a tournament still matters and the ranking scale that I developed seems to be well-received - which means that the best players get into and care about the tournaments by my scale.

So, for the Players Championship, Henrik Stenson got 95 points since it was in tier 1a of my scale.  Angel Cabrera would get 100 points for winning the Masters.  The scale varies, and I can share that later.

Then, for each successive player that may the cut and played all of the rounds of the event, they got one less point that the person before them.  In the event of ties, the points were averaged out among those players tied.

Next, I applied two penalties to everyone but the winner of the tournament.  First, the field was docked by the value of the margin of victory divided by the number of rounds in the event.  So, for Brian Gay's 10 shot win at the Heritage, the field cost themselves 10/4 or 2.5 points because none of them could get closer to him than that.

Also, the second penalty to the field is based upon how well the last place, cut-making player does relative to the leader.  This penalty is much lighter.  It's the difference in strokes between the winner and the last place player, divided by the number of rounds, and then multiplied by 1 over the number of rounds.  So, if a tournament winner is separated by 30 shots from the last place player that made the cut, then the formula is:

The result is a system that makes it more difficult to actually score points in the first place.  Even players that make the cut do not necessarily get points.  This is particularly helpful for those lowly opposite field events where the field stinks.  Players shouldn't get points for making the cut in a stinker field.  They should get points for finishing well in a stinker field.  Compare that to the Players Championship where almost every player should (and did) get points.

Now, we sum the points together and divide that number by the number of events that they played.  This gets us their average and determines the best players on the PGA Tour this season.

Without further adieu, here's my list.

POINTS PER START

TOTAL POINTS

Taking a look at the data, you have to be wondering how Phil Mickelson isn't well up there on the list.  Well, despite his solid play in a couple of events, he had lacked luster in many other starts.  On the average chart, he's in the 20s.

Obviously, Tiger wouldn't make the total points leaderboard because he hasn't played enough times to make that list.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the system and whether or not it accurately reflects the players on Tour, the events they play, and the like. Let's make the perfect system!