Official World Golf Rankings Modified, But Still Very Biased

The Official World Golf Ranking board has made a change to the way that the rankings are calculated.  Call it the "Vijay Rule."

The Governing Board of the Official World Golf Ranking approved a measure to introduce a "Maximum Divisor" into the World Ranking system.  The Maximum Divisor is designed to diminish current concerns that players might be penalised for playing a significant number of tournaments because their divisor is much higher as a result.  This divisor will be for a player’s last 52 events – the current average number of events played by the world’s top 200 players over the two-year ranking cycle. By using the "Last-52" events, a player who exceeds the maximum divisor will retain his current ranking points and only lose his earlier degraded points and retain a divisor of 52.

In other words, someone like Vijay will not be as negatively impacted by playing the rigorous schedule that he does.

The other stated intent is an attempt to prevent players from withdrawing from events so that their divisor is not negatively impacted, which would hamper their rankings to get into big events.

But, as a bit of an expert on the OWGR and its biases, I can tell you that the change is really rather cosmetic.  It doesn't address the self-perpetuating gaming of the system by European and Asian Tour events, or the preposterous notion of "home tour ranking points."

No one in the media could really tell you that, though.  Doug Ferguson still doesn't quite get it.  From his notes column on the announcement:

The formula is based on ranking points earned at each tournament, divided by the number of tournaments played. The value of points are gradually reduced every 13 weeks over a two-year period, with a minimum divisor of 40 tournaments.  That helped Tiger Woods, who doesn’t play 40 times over a two-year period.

Actually, it hurt Woods by giving him a divisor of forty even though he has not played forty times in the last two years.  It diluted his points and his ranking.  It still is.  Woods should have a much larger lead in the OWGR over Phil Mickelson than he does.