I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball.
In a bride egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Frida Egg, frid Egg Egg, fride Egg, bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off.
Of the hump.
Welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today we are digging into the debates around the Official World Golf Ranking. The ow g R, which is the dominant global ranking system in men's professional golf, has somewhat surprisingly become a lightning rod for controversy this year. There are two main reasons for that. One, a few months ago, the OWGR introduced a new formula that critics say, we'll do may damage to any tour not named the PGA Tour.
And two, the Upstart League Live Golf has not yet been approved by the OWGR and probably won't be anytime soon. LIV is desperate to change this because world ranking points are an important way that players qualify for the four majors, and Live's advocates have pointed out that the OWGR is governed by a board that includes PGA Tour Commissioner j Monahan and others invested in golf's status quo. So it's a big conspiracy, except not really. It's more complicated than that.
And to sort it all out, I'm talking to Joseph Lamanna. Joseph is the co founder of Optimal Approach Golf, which advises elite golfers on data and strategy. He's also the writer of the Finding the Edge newsletter, where he's done some excellent stuff recently about the OWGR issue. Joseph, how you doing.
I'm great, thanks for having me. Garrett really excited to talk about OWGR. I think I was pretty slow to formalize my thoughts on it. I wanted to give it some time and see how the formula was shaking out. But this is the perfect forum to have a more nuanced conversation around it. There's probably a lot of topics that we get worked up around that aren't worth the conversation. I think this one is an important topic and is worth a long conversation, so I'm really excited to do this. Cool.
Yeah, this one actually does have an impact on the landscape of professional golf, and we've also been kind of slow to do a podcast about it. We've done a few newsletter pieces about it. But when this started to become controversial, when the OWGR started to become something that people were debating, I remember thinking to myself, I am so unprepared to have an opinion about this because I just don't know how it works. And I think that I might still not know really how it works, which
is part of why I'm talking to you. I think you understand it a little bit better, but I'm starting to get there, and hopefully we can listeners there as well. I wanted to first talk about the new formula, right This is a big bone of contention right now. A lot of people are angry about it, some more performatively so than others. Shout out Lee Westwood. John Rahm has repeatedly called it laughable. Tiger Woods doesn't even seem sold
on it. So maybe you could just describe to me what the perceived problem was with the old OWGR formula and then what the new one tries to do differently.
Yep. I think that's the perfect starting point. So I think the best way to lay the framework for talking about the official World Golf Rankings, whether it's pre August of twenty twenty two, which is when the change went into effect or post August of twenty twenty two. It's important to always keep in mind that fundamental to calculating an official World Golf ranking is evaluating strengths of field.
That is the fundamental piece of assessing a ranking. Right, there are golfers all around the world playing every weekend, not altogether, so you can't do an official World Golf rankings based on their scoring average. Right, somebody shoots sixty eight, that could be a much better score than somebody who shot seventy one across the world, but not necessarily conditions change. You have to have some way of standardizing performance, and what that relies upon is overlap and basically being able
to link between tours. So you have some golfers playing European Tour events, you can compare their performance in European Tour events, DP World Tour events to their performance in PGA Tour events or to other tours around the world, and you can start to understand the relative strengths of field. The way the system used to work was that it determined the strengths of the field based on your official
World Golf ranking. Specifically of top two hundred ranked players, and it gave out points to the field based on how many top two hundred Official World Golf ranked players there were in their rankings. The issue you can run into is if that system is biased, it becomes circular, where the issue with the ranking itself then perpetuates the issue of the official World Golf ranking because you are
basing the strength of the field on the ranking. The change that happened in August of twenty twenty two was basically an attempt to abstract themselves from that issue. So now instead of deciding how strong a field is based on your official World Golf ranking, they're going to be they are deciding it based on their strokes gained, world rating a lot of words. Basically, what it means is a standardized way of assessing your performance over the last
two years. I think proponents of the new system would say the biggest issue before was this circular issue basing strengths of field based on your official World Golf ranking itself and which.
In turns which in turn determines your official World Golf ranking. Right, That's the circular piece of it. That was the problem. So then it could you know, eventually over time result in some inaccuracy. So the new system is a way to get away from that by using this strokes gained rating. And so then what is that and why is that different?
Right? So your strokes gained rating is based on how you've played over the past two years, and they basically adjust your scores based on the it's called a fixed effects model. I don't know that people need to go two into the weeds of what that does, but it's basically saying, hey, if Garrett Morrison shot seventy one at the Players Championship in round one, how does that stack up with a seventy four in the BMWPGA Championship based
on this overlapping of players. Once you've standardized that for ormance, you can understand where a player stacks up globally and use that to assess how strong a field is. And instead of just doing the top two hundred ranked players, it'll it'll do the entire field. It'll rank the entire field. So other point to call out is with this circular issue that I was mentioning before, if there's a bias
within the system, it perpetuates itself. Well, if was true there was a bias within the system, and there was a mechanism for that, which was minimum points given to particular events, which we can get more into. But Mark Brody had written a large study in twenty twelve on how there was bias within the system, so this was not hypothetical that they were solving for some issue that didn't exist. There was bias within the system, namely against
PGA Tour players. They were not being ranked as high as they should have based on a true, accurate methodology.
Mark Brody, being the inventor of Strokes Gain, Yeah, that was wonderfully clear, Joseph. I actually learned quite a bit from that myself, because this Strokes Gained piece of it.
I didn't properly understand before. One thing that I think I did hear about before, and that has been discussed a lot, is this issue of the previous bias of the OWGR formula, which Mark Brody pointed out in that well known paper where he basically showed that players on the European Tour were somewhat overrated by the OWGR European Tour and other tours in the world compared to the PGA Tour, where the competition was quite a bit stronger.
Because of these minimums that the OWGR had, players who were playing on weaker tours could kind of get gradually better and better world rankings, better and better starts, better opportunities to get more OWGR points because they were kind of playing mainly on a tour that was being propped up somewhat by the old system.
That is true. And to reiterate that point, Okay, if a player is ranked fifty second in the world when they actually should be ranked closer to eightieth, well, now they're going the fields that they're going to enter, they're being represented as the fifty second ranked player in the world.
So and then that issue perpetuates itself. So that is the nature of the circular issue that I was describing, And I think anecdotally what would often happen is you'd have these international players ranked somewhere around sixty to fifty, you know, forty five, they'd get into a WGC and they'd finish at the bottom of the leader board. This
wasn't people's eyes betraying them. This was actually happening. And it's sometimes an inconvenient truth to call out that actually the strengths of field between different tours is pretty different. So it's not just that, you know, we think the margins are so so thin and that sixty fifth player
actually is the sixty fifth best player the world. The margins are a bit wider than that, and that's sort of an inconvenient truth that's necessary to the conversation and addressing some of the issues around the official World Golf rankings.
The top ten players in the world aren't just a little bit better than you know, someone closer to one hundred in the world. There is a bigger gap there. Now players can move between those places in the world ranking, but the quality of play that gets you to the top ten in the world is quite different, and it's not just a it's not like a you know, a razor thin margin, and so these are meaningful differences now
in that old system. I think that the WGCs really were the place that exposed this because the WGCs were no cut events right with small fields, and you'd see players get into the wgc's This is part of the idea of the WGC that players from these other tours other than the PGA Tour would get an opportunity like this.
But they'd arrive at these events and often they would kind of get slaughtered, and so it seems like that's where this issue in the owgr really became legible in a specific way to golf fans and other people in the golf world.
I guess I agree, and the part I would kind of dig my heels in and this could spark a little bit of tension. But some people would argue, well, it's not they're not finishing at the bottom of the leaderboards necessarily because they aren't as strong with players. There could be other factors at play, like the style and golf course being different. Right, So they do well on the Japanese Golf Tour, but then when they go to an American style course, their games don't translate as well.
That's why they're finishing near the bottom of the leader board. I would vehemently disagree, and I would not attribute that to differences in the golf course. You could sell me on there being a little bit of a travel component, you know. I know Padre Harrington on Twitter put out a couple reasons that he suspects for some of this underperformance.
I would dig my heels in and say, this is almost, you know, ninety plus percent explained by differences in skill quality, not differences in the golf course.
All right, So the new formula tries to take away some of those biases that elevated players on other tours. Now, what do you think the downstream effects of this new formula will be? What are you know, whether it's immediate, next year or a few years down the line, how do you think that the landscape of professional golf is going to start to look different in both good and potentially bad ways.
Yeah, and this is where the conversation starts to get nuanced. So you know, I think a necessary part of this conversation becomes the question of what is the role of the official World Golf rankings? And so there are people who would maintain that all the official World Golf Rankings should be doing is providing an accurate assessment of where golfers stack up for the purpose of qualification into the majors or determining who the number one ranked golfer in
the world is. So issues like, hey, well, now this might disincentivize top professionals from showing up in particular events. Somebody might make that argument, and then on the other side they'd say, but that's not the role of the official World Golf rankings to go and incentivize John Rahm to show up at a particular event. So I do think this is a question that we'll probably keep coming
back to throughout the conversation. But to address directly your question, there is less of an incentive now for top players to show up in some weekly fielded, particularly international events. I do think this will weaken the non PGA tours a bit because it just doesn't provide as much of an incentive for you to go up and get as many points. A clear example of this is that if you win an event by one, or if you win an event by six, you're not getting a different number
of official World Golf Rankings points. So for John Rahm to play really, really well in a strong fielded PGA Tour event, he might win by one and get all of those official World Golf Rankings points. But if he then goes and plays in the Australian Open, for example, and wins by six plays similarly, he doesn't get the same number of points that he would get on the
PGA Tour. So if you think about like an expected points per start, his expectations would be better in these strong fielded PGA tour events, which, if you follow the train of thought here, can destabilize some of these tours that have sort of been reduced down to feeder tours to the PGA Tour. So that's the main I would say downstream effect is how it incentivizes play across the world.
You can easily see how this new formula will certainly weaken tours across the world because one thing that these tours really rely on is big players occasionally showing up right and kind of making some of their bigger events a bigger deal. Now, PGA tour players who were born in Europe, like John Rahm, are certainly less incentivized to
go support their national opens. John ram consistently goes back to Spain every year, plays in the Spanish Open, plays often in the Andalusian Masters, and makes those events a much higher profile deal than they would be if he didn't show up because he is a major, major star. I think that we want those players to do that. But the question is to go back to your point whether the OWGR should be in the business of promoting players.
To do that. Yeah, and I will come back to that in a second. I want to address one thing you said on the I should John Rahm go and play in some of these events that he supported over the years. I know I'm kind of annoying about this, but just to stay on brand here, part of the issue is that the FedEx Cup incentivizes you to play
as much PGA Tour golf as possible. Right, Yes, And so if you're already if John Ram has to deal with that, right that, if I want to win the FedEx Cup, I need to be playing in as many events as possible. And you're telling him we're already having an issue getting him to show up to the Spanish Open, or you could Australian Open. Now there's even less of
an incentive to show up plus travel. Right, you can see how these changes would make it even more difficult to get some of these top players to show up
in some of those events. But to more directly answer your question of do I think that's the role of the official World Golf rankings to promote golf globally in the health of all of these global tours, I don't know that I have this strongest opinion on it, but you could sell me that the answer is yes, Because if it's not them, who is it not saying that
that's necessarily my opinion. I see both sides of this argument, but I do think it does drive the health of these tours, and if there's not another governing body that's overseeing this, there has to be a cohesiveness to the tours and what incentives it's providing top players. Because we're telling John Ram, hey, we want you to stay on the PGA Tour, we don't want you to join live, but you're also telling you're also not providing him a clean infrastructure to play in the events that he wants
to play in and be rewarded appropriately. So personally, and I could be wrong, I don't want to put words in John Ram's mouth. I think part of the reason he has such an issue with the new official World Golf rankings is less of a methodology tension and more him not appreciating the golf landscape that's been laid out for him that has some flaws and the incentives it provides. That's my personal opinion, but that is sort of where I stand.
And part of John Rahm's specific problem with all of this certainly must have to do with the new emerging PGA Tour requirements that top players play in a certain number of elevated PGA Tour events exactly, and so you know, his grievance is probably more broad than just what's going on with the OWGR, But the new OWGR formula and the effect that it has on secondary tours might have just been kind of a further twist of the knife. Now for John Rams specifically, and for European tour players
European sorry born players as well. One of the issues is that they have to play in a certain number of dp World Tour only events in order to qualify for the Ryder Cup. So they have to do this anyway, and American players on the PGA Tour don't have the same requirement, and so really, you know, they're being kind
of pushed in different ways. The new overall requirements of the PGA Tour, the OWGR formula, all of it seems to be affecting European born players in worse ways than American players, and arguably also affecting players who were born, say in Australia or South Africa or Japan or in another Asian country worse than it affects American born players. It's all kind of part of the same change in
the world of golf in this live era. Now. Uh. One point that I have always been confused about with this is that the OWGR governing Board consists of the following people. There's the chairman of it, Peter Dawson, There's a representative from Augusta National. There's Keith Pelley, the CEO of the dp World Tour. There's Sethwah of the PGA of America. There's j Monahan of the PGA Tour, Martin Slumbers of the RNA, Mike Wan of the USGA, and
a representative of the International Federation of PGA Tours. When coming up with this new formula, where in the world was Keith Pelly, Where was Martin Slumbers of the RNA. Where was the International Federation of the PGA Tours. Maybe I just don't understand the process very well, but I'm baffled as to why they Maybe they did raise an objection, but I'm a little confused as to how this new
formula could get by this committee. I mean, JAYE. Monahan is on there, yes, and he benefits from this, but I'm not sure who else on the committee would have been like, yeah, this is this is a great idea. You know that they're supposed to be representing the interests of their tours and their organizations, and for a lot of them, this new formula doesn't seem to serve those interests.
Well, I think you could spin it and you could say, well, we're removing bias from a system. We should all everyone at this table should agree that there shouldn't be bias baked into the system. Therefore, what is your objection? And that becomes a little bit of a difficult position to put somebody like Keith Pelly in to actually make him answer that question. But I think what you're bringing up is kind of a natural transition to one point that I had wanted to bring up, which I don't know
how incendiary I want to be here. But if the official with golf rankings, the new methodology, if the point of it is purely to remove all bias and to just rank players how they should be ranked, why are there still minimum points given to the majors into the players Championship. I think that's an uncomfortable question for them to potentially have to defend.
Hey, so Joseph wanted me to clarify something here. When he said minimum points, what he really meant was that the Majors and the Players now get fixed point allocations basically, which makes them unique. Because other events get points based on their strength of field. That's not the case with the Majors and the Players. That's all he was trying to say. There, all right, back to it.
Why if we've tried to remove all of the bias from the system, why not just let the system exist on its own. Why do we have to give eighty first place points to the Players Championship and one hundred to the Majors. Why is that distinction being drawn? I think I know the answer, which is that they might even say, well, we don't want the Players Championship to get more points than the Masters, for example, because that.
Could happen because the field is so much stronger and is.
A bigger field. So we're actually doing this to prop up the majors, designate them explicitly as the pinnacle of golf, and make sure that, for example, the Players Championship doesn't exceed it. But my counter argument to that would be, and you are acknowledging that the Official World Golf Rankings is trying to do something beyond the scope of purely ranking the players so if you've already broken down that wall, then why can't we use it as a way to
facilitate the growth of golf globally. That is the argument that I would start to bring up, and I think it's it gets into a lot of difficult conversations about what the purpose of the Official World Golf Rankings is.
Does that make sense that I've done that? Absolutely, that makes sense. Well, basically you're using the logic, the new logic of the OWGR against itself by pointing out that, yes, it is actually doing something other than just purely ranking the players. Because clearly this policy of minimum points for the majors and the players is a way to pacify objections from Augusta National because the Masters would get hit
pretty hard by the new formula. In relation to tournaments like the Players or the PGA Championship, which have tradition had big, very strong fields, the Masters, because of its various odd traditions, doesn't have a huge field and has a lot of players in that field who aren't the
strongest players. And so clearly the od WJR Is making a compromise on that specific front, but doesn't seem to be giving the same consideration to some of the weaker tours around the world who might need some help as well. So yeah, it's tricky, I mean, and we're not privy to all the conversations that this governing board had. I'm sure there were many considerations that they went through that
we haven't gone through. But on its face, it just seems like the ODEBJR is making a statement we are just a world ranking system except when it comes to the except when it comes to the Masters, and we don't want to piss those guys off because they'll they'll have us murdered.
And that's where I want to be somewhat cautious with what I say, because I'm not privy to any of those conversations, and there could be considerations beyond the ones that I've come cross and doing independent research. But that being said, and this is where I want to be
careful about how incendiary I want to be. If you were live golf and you were trying to build the case that there's collusion against you or that there's some cooperation between the tours, the PGA Tour specifically, and like the official World Golf rankings, this is probably a point that I would explore pretty thoroughly.
Yeah, for sure. Why don't we make an example here to give people something to kind of hold on to going forward. So, you know, a few weeks ago, the DP World Tour Championship on the European Tour happened on the same week as the RSM Classic on the PGA Tour. The DP World Tour Championship had a fifty player field with seven of the top twenty five players in the OWGR. The RSM Classic had one hundred and fifty five player
field with none of the top twenty five players. So the winner of the RSM Class got about thirty seven OWGR points, whereas the winner of the DP World Tour Championship got twenty two points or so. A lot of people said, this is unfair. Look at the DP World Tour Championship. That's a big event. It's the capstone event of the European Tour schedule. The RSM Classic is just a fall series, almost hitting Giggle Out on Sea Island.
This is ridiculous, And on its face that might seem to be a legitimate point because just according to the eye test, the DP World Tour Championship is a bigger event. It's just that a win there is more meaningful than a win at the RSM Classic in terms of just like legacy and how good it looks on your resume. I think it's hard to argue otherwise, but the new OWGR system doesn't take those kinds of things into consideration.
So why was the RSM Classic stronger and do you think it should have been or what should people understand better about why it was given more status on the OWTR.
Yeah, so the main thing to understand is that the Official World Golf Ranking methodology is really trying to give out points based pretty purely on how hard a championship is to win. And when there are one hundred and fifty five players in an event, many of them you know, really strong PGA Tour players. They might not be the top ranked players in the world, but there you still get one hundred and fifty five really strong players together.
It's extremely difficult to beat them over a four day period. And so the RSM Classic, even if it seems at its face easier to win than the DP World Tour Championship, it's not necessarily I had the RSM as slightly harder to win. I do think that you can make a pretty compelling argument that the thirty seven versus the twenty two was a little bit wide in terms of how
those points were given to the winner. So potentially the official World Golf Rankings you maybe have could play around with their distributions a little bit and shouldn't have given the difference between a winning RSM versus winning the DP World Tour shouldn't have been as wide as it was.
But on its face, you have to appreciate that when there's a large field, it's going to be rewarded more heavily in this new system of the ficial World Golf Rankings than the previous And I would say to John Rahm and to the others who played in the DP World Championship, the system kind of vindicated itself with the leader board. Jhon rom Won and the other top players in the world. I think five of the seven of them finished like in the top six.
They romped, They beat the rest of the field pretty handily.
And that's what I'm saying where that there actually are these pretty big differences in quality of play between the thirtieth best player in that field and the thirtieth best player in the RSM Classic. So I actually think the Official Golf Rankings didn't end up looking like a bad methodology here, contrary to some of the outrage around.
It, if the OWGR were a completely independent organization, so if its governing board did not consist of representatives from the various tours that constitute the status quo in the golf world right now, if it were instead an utterly independent organization, what differences between the new formula and this invented, completely independent one do you think there would be?
I think it would look almost identical to how it looks now. The main difference would be that you would not have those minimum points given to the majors and given to the players championship. Frankly, I think it's pretty hard to defend why those exist.
Now for a quick word from our sponsor, this is all about hygiene. Men's hygiene, you know, making sure you're a groomed man and below the belt. Trimming tends to be a taboo topic, but Meridian is breaking the stigma and helping everyone take better care of their bodies. They
have a new trimmer's the Trimmer Plus. It's got a lot of new bells and whistles, features that are uh, They're gonna make trimming easier six thousand rpm motor that's very fast, flexible ceramic blade anti Nick shavidguard that seems really important. It is waterproof also, which which is nice, and cordless and ninety minutes a charge, so if you're traveling whatever, you can bring it with you and you don't have to worry about it it dying on you
while you're out on the road without the charger. They have a nice travel case that I actually use when I travel, so I would check it out. Meridian Grooming dot com is where you go, and if you use the promo code fried Egg, you'll get ten percent off. Thank you for Meridian coming back and supporting the show again. You could go to Meridian Grooming dot com and check out their wide array of grooming products, including their world class trimmers.
All right, let's get into the live stuff. The reason Live doesn't have OWGR points right now is that the OWGR has certain criteria for membership. Right First of all, there's a waiting period before a new tour's application gets approved. There are also requirements like the majority of a tour's events need to have seventy two holes thirty six hole cut field sizes of seventy five or above and so on. A tour needs to have an open qualifying process. That's
another thing. All of these things are, you know, these are things that Live doesn't have right now. But before we get into like specific criteria, why does the OWGR need to have criteria for admission at all? What's the logic behind that?
Yeah, it's a great question, and I think with all of these type questions it is often useful to go to a logical extreme. So the extreme I would present you with is if you have a group of fifty golfers and they all sign a ten year contract guaranteed it's gonna be the same fifty golfers for each of the next ten years in these events, how would you
evaluate the strength of that field in year one? Well, you kind of know, based on their current official golf ranking and how they've been playing on other tours where they should stack up, So doing it in year one probably not that big of an issue. But let's say this tour is isolated and those players are never going and playing any other events, how would you evaluate the
strength of that field in year five? Because now they've just been playing against each other for five straight years and never participating in another event, there's no overlap between them and other tours of the players getting older and their performance is starting to drop off, how would we know? So the point I'm making is that overlap between tours is an integral part of assessing strengths of field, which
is kind of why we started the discussion there. And so there needs to be some adherence to standards so that we can rank these players properly. Now, is all the criteria necessary? I think reasonable minds can argue that point, But I think it's hard to argue that there doesn't need to be adherence to any criteria at.
All, because you just let chaos in and so you're essentially forced as a world ranking system to come up with criteria of some kind. Otherwise it would just be a free for all and it would be absurd. And so the folks who are saying why are these criteria there in the first place, Well, there seems to be a pretty solid reason why certain criteria need to exist. And these criteria need to define what a real golf event looks like. So which requirements along those lines FORWGR
points do you think are actually important? You know, in defining a legitimate golf event.
It's a good question. I mean, to be honest, I think the only the spirit of the only requirement that I may have would have to do with overlap. So we need a way for new players to get onto your tour and for your players to be participating in other tours. I think other parts like field size could be important. You don't have three person tour like that wouldn't make any sense. But could you rank players even
if you didn't adhere to all this criteria? Yes, So for example, like having a cut, I don't think is necessary. I don't see why to rank players you need to have a cut personally, right, there's nothing preventing you from rating players performance in a no cut event.
Yeah.
So the only criteria that I would say is necessary is has to do with the flow of players and having an interconnected system.
Well, and if you had an eighteen hole tour event with a four player field, then it just wouldn't get many points, right, Maybe it could get o WGR points, but it would get so few that it would be totally insignificant. That's kind of an extreme example, but that's
sort of what the new system allows to happen. Right, You can have a sliding scale of you know, different quality events, and if it's not a fairly big field seventy two hole event, then it's just not going to get significant world ranking points in a way that's going to upset the world order of golf.
Right, And you're saying that's an extreme example, eighteen holes four players, But I actually think that's the way you should go about this thought exercise is taking it to extremes to understand why the criteria is in place. I think it's reasonable for them to insist that a tournament
needs to be of a certain length. I don't think eighteen holes it's so noisy that I don't think eighteen holes gives you the best representation of how performance happened, especially if, like something there's a weird weather phenomenon that has a bigger impact on an eighteen hole sample than over seventy two holes. So I think having some length of a tournament requirement is reasonable. But some of the other requirement, like having a cut, I don't think needs to exist.
And we can talk about cut in a second, but fifty four holes, is there anything about that that you think is illegitimate or that shouldn't be admissible for the OWGR criteria. So you know, just to be clear, fifty
four hole events do exist on OWGR tours. Events get OWGR points that have fifty four holes, but in general a tour needs to have kind of an average of seventy two holes or a majority of its events being seventy two holes in order to be admitted to the OWGR and so Live currently because it holds only fifty four whole events does not meet that criterion. So do you think fifty four holes is too noisy in order to get ob JR points or is that enough?
If it were so impermissible, then I don't think we'd count fifty four hole tournaments that were shortened due to weather as wins, right, And I think there are some instances where they haven't counted as official wins. But my point would be, I think you can rank players based on fifty four holes. If you said it had to be seventy two, well why is it seventy two? Why
isn't it ninety or one hundred and eight? Like obviously, the more holes you have, the higher quality of a winner you should expect to rise to the top, But why seventy two versus ninety versus one hundred and eighth versus fifty four. I think you could do it with fifty four, even if it's a little bit noisier. You could just penalize that by giving fewer points. So I think it's possible. There are other things live is not
adhering to that are bigger issues. But I think there's a world where you could give points to a tour that only has fifty four whole events.
Okay, the cut issue, why do you think it is that a cut is required in the criteria. I find that to be an odd one.
I'm honestly not sure, and I know that you pose this question before, like what benefit does a cut provide to a golf tournament? I think there are reasons why a cut is a cool feature of a tournament, but in terms of that being an obstacle to ranking players objectively, I don't think that a cut is necessary. So I can't speak exactly to what the rationale is behind requiring a cut. Maybe it's just that it's within the spirit of golf to have something like that, but I don't
think it's necessary personally. I could be somebody could present account your argument that I'm open minded about accepting, so would be happy to hear from from the proponents of having a cut to rank players, But no, you can rank a player without having a cut.
It does seem like a spirit of the game thing, which I kind of endorse. I think I've come to think that cuts are a pretty good part of a golf tournament. But like you, I don't really see why having a cut would facilitate ranking players. If the purpose of the OWGR is just to rank players and not to defend the spirit of the game, then I'm not sure why a cut is there now. The reason that I think cuts can be good is that they do
introduce a little bit of intensity and demand. It just makes a tournament more of a challenge, and it makes it so that players who are not bringing it immediately just get ejected from the tournament, don't get any money, don't get any points. And there's like a kind of fairness to that because it facilitates getting those players who are just missing cut after cut after cut off the tour. Because if you aren't making cuts, then you shouldn't be
on the tour. There should be other people on there who are making cuts, right and who are competing at a high level in every round. So I like the fact that cuts are there in a majority of big time events, But again, I don't really see why it's necessary for ranking players, and so the fact that the ODWGR has it as one of its criteria is a little bit confusing.
I guess yeah, And look from an entertainment perspective, I think there's a huge benefit to having players sitting on the couch while their fellow PGA Tour players are hoisting a trophy on Sunday because they missed the cut. Like, you don't have to sell me on that being of benefit to the game of golf. But it goes back to the central question of what is the role of the Official World Golf Rankings Because they're not it's not explicitly mentioned that part of their mission is to facilitate
the entertainment of golf worldwide, it's to rank players. So it just everything we're going to talk about is going to go back to that question. That's the role of the Official World Golf Rankings, and that's why it's such an important question to answer.
Do you think if Live stays in its current form an invitational fifty four holes, no cut, fields of forty eight team golf. If it sticks with that, do you think it should ever get OWGR points.
If it's an isolated entity. No. If there is this constant players are locked into contracts. Therefore they're getting a bunch of guaranteed starts, and it's hard for somebody to enter the system. There's no guarantees that those players are going to be playing a significant number of non live events, then no, I do not believe Live should get Official
World Golf Ranking points. If it's a much more open qualification and you have those players playing a lot of other tournaments worldwide so that there's enough overlap you can consistently rank the strengths of field even if they don't have a cut, then yes, I would be fine on
Live receiving Official World Golf Rankings points. There needs to be in sured encoded some level of interconnectedness between Live and other golf tours, and that kind of runs against the spirit of the entity that they're trying to create. So there are some philosophical differences between how Live views itself and how another tour that's a participant within the Official World Golf Rankings views itself, and that's what needs to change.
So this interconnectedness between live and other tours, what are the main institutions through which that can be made to happen.
Yeah, it has to be some form of open qualification, and I think you'd almost have to have. Ideally you'd have non live players playing in live tour events so you could get a feel for how people are stacking up, but that's not necessarily practical. But yes, the answer here is that it's some form of open qualification and ensuring that there's overlap between those players and the players on live and the players that are on every other tour in the world.
Do you see that happening with live. I've tried to figure this out where I've been trying to think, like what would open qualifying look like for a live event. Would it be something ridiculous like there are four spots and you can qualify for those, or maybe that wouldn't be ridiculous. I don't know. How do you think they could actually facilitate this given their current structure.
I think it's difficult because the PGA Tour is imposing a ban on players who participate in a live event. So even if you have open qualification, if a player is on an Asian Tour and they end up qualifying and playing. It's not like they'd be bringing a lot of points into that live event for live players to consume anyway. So it's hard to get to a point where live players, by entering the official World Golf Ranking ecosystem could start to kind of work their way back up.
That's very unlikely. So if you're thinking about this from like the PGA Tours perspective, the savvy move is to just stall this thing as long as possible and then give them points because they won't be getting many points anyway, So I just thinking of game theory wise, or however you want to think about it, that's kind of the savvy strategy is just hey, we're reviewing the application and then you approve it like a year from now, and all their Official World Golf rankings will be down pretty
far and they're locked into guaranteed contracts, so there aren't a lot of new points entering the system.
Yeah, I mean that was going to be my next question. If Live were to get points, how many points would it get and would Live still be a viable pathway to the majors, Because that's the big question about OWR points. I think that's what players care about. Can I earn enough OWGR points at this event or on this tour to continue to qualify for majors through the OWGR. Will Live, ever, especially under the new formula, be able to offer that pathway.
It's not likely right now. But one of the ways you do that is you bring players. You sign players who have a strong stroke skiined world rating to your tour once you've become approved, which is part of why I thought, like, maybe they'll wait on cam Smith a little bit before bringing him over, like, go let him keep getting his keeping his official World Golf ranking up. I think the other thing this does is it really
raises the stakes out of major championship. Now, if you're Live, you need your guys to go play well in the majors, not just from an optics perspective on how strong your tour is, but you need them bringing those that strokes
gained world rating back into your fields. So I don't I don't really anticipate a world where Live gets accredited and has enough points in their system for players to gain entrance into the majors unless they bring When that happens, they bring like four really highly rated players over and then their own players have decent strokes, gained world ratings from majors, and the can kind of start to get points that way. But it's going to be an uphill battle.
Yeah, what do you think the endgame here is for Live? If you were making decisions about the future of Live as a viable world golf tour where players could play on Live full time and also participate in the majors. What is the goal, right, Is it to get the forty eight best players in the world on the tour so that even if they are small field events and are getting docked by THEWGR formula, that the fields are so strong that players will still get enough points to
qualify for the majors. Or is the goal to negotiate with the majors and establish a non OWGR pathway from Live to the Masters, to the PGA Championship to the US Open. Do you think that's a more likely outcome or strategy for Live to get its players into the majors.
I mean, you're asking me to put my self in the shoes of people that live in those boardrooms, and I'm comfortable doing that. Like that is sort of the question here. I think and I feel pretty high conviction about this without having any knowledge of I've never been
in contact with Live once. I believe that they are saying to themselves, we're going to shift the balance of power to where we have the players, or they need to negotiate with us, because I don't think they've gone too far down the scenarios of how are we an integrated body with other tours and what happens if our
players are playing in their events. I think they're just thinking about this as once we have enough top players, they have to accommodate us because we are the biggest show in town and all of golf can go ahead and die. That's fine. People are still going to be watching our events. So personally, I think that's what the
strategy is. I don't think there's any math happening in those boardrooms around the new methodology and how what it means for when Cam Smith goes up and plays shows up and plays the RBC Heritage, if he's ever allowed again. I don't think they're worrying about that.
Yeah. Yeah, they just want to be the center of power in the golf world so that if there's a new owgr it forms it self around Live instead of forming itself around the PGA Tour, which seems to be kind of the shape of it right now.
I think they're trying to say to the official Golf rankings like it's it's us or it's obsolescence, right like that is I think the ultimately what the card that they're trying to play, which makes sense. I mean, that's that's a reasonable route to go. But you have to be pretty dismissive of a lot of their comments around them wanting to be growing the game and a cooperative actor if you believe what I believe about what their intentions are.
Yeah, now that raises my last question. You mentioned obsolescence for the OWGR, which is which seems to be kind of a possibility if you believe in the potential of Live to kind of spend its way to the very top of the golf world. The OWGR could get really marginalized if it doesn't work with Live in that situation. But I want to go like a different another counterfactual,
very speculative. What would happen. What would the world of golf look like if we just did away with the OWGR tomorrow, if we dissolved it and didn't have World ranking points anymore, Would things be worse? Would things be better?
Well? Yeah, and I think the Official World Golf Rankings is pretty safe for now and as long as you live doesn't sign too many more top players, right, that's the domino that kind of shatters every other domino if if that were to happen. I have thought about, like, well, what is an alternative to the official World Golf Rankings, which is sort of the question you're asking kind of like what would it look like? What would the world
without Official World Golf Rankings look like. I think there's a world where you reframe what entrance into the majors looks like, and you start to give points based off of the tour and maybe instead of staying points like spots like hey, Japan tour, historical analysis shows that you have one player per year that's of quality to play
in the Masters. We want to facilitate the growth of golf worldwide, so we're going to give you three spots, and so you can start to think about entrance into the majors based on like how many spots are being designated throughout the world, and that kind of props up the tours. I think that's possible. I'm not advocating for it, but if you're asking me to do the thought exercise and what the world could look like without official wood golf rankings, that's kind of where my head goes.
Yeah, I mean, I just think of the majors kind of revising their criteria not to include OWGR points.
But then what purpose is the ficial wood golf rankings even serving?
That's yeah, none, right, I guess that's sort of the point. Is that right now the relevance of the OWGR beyond just kind of like symbolic. I'm ranked this in the OWGR. Maybe it's tied to certain incentives with my sponsors getting a particular ranking. Being number one is a really meaningful thing that players seem to be bought into. But all of that is symbolic stuff, right The main thing right now is the interface between the tours, the OWGR, and
the majors. That's what it is really doing right now, and so if you cut that off, then you know, why do we have this system in the first place, and is it doing any good for the golf world? I guess that's the real question I want to ask. Do you think the OWGR is good for the golf world.
I think it serves an important purpose in the golf world. Yes, do. I think that those point minimums may have ended up serving some benefit on net to the golf world too, like maybe to the flagship events so that you get some more players into the majors. But that's not really the purpose of the Official Golf Rankings. So it's a nuanced conversation. I think it's difficult to figure out exactly
what the optimal system is. But to your point of like, well, maybe the Masters then is just going to let create some other avenue for live players to get in. Live is at to get the Masters, Like I fully believe it, Live is trying to disrupt golf in such meaningful ways that I'm not sure it's in the Master's best interest to cooperate. So that the question, but the Masters was involved. They're on the board of the Official World Golf Rankings Committee.
They none of these changes, these downstream effects of the Official with Golf Rankings should be of any surprise to them. So personally, I think it's beneficial for all of those people in that room to be aligned. And yeah, whether or not the Fficial World Golf Rankings is of benefit to the world. I think depends on your perspective. I would say yes, it is mostly a benefit.
Yeah, I mean, and I'm just poking at it because I'm trying to figure out what are the ways in which the OWGR has kind of enmeshed itself in the professional golf world. And what I'm finding here is that it's like deeply, deeply enmeshed. It's got its tentacles way
in there. You know, you mentioned the Masters. Why would the Masters open up a pathway to live given that Augusta National sits on the OWGR board, And that's a great point because the OWGR has enmeshed itself with the majors in this way, and so it's like this really established institution in golf. But the thing is, it didn't exist until the eighties, right, It hasn't been around forever. And I don't think that the majors had OWGR criteria
available until even more recently than that. I think it happened sometime around the late nineties and early two thousands when the majors began to include OWGR qualification as an option, and so all of this is pretty recent. But at the same time, to disentangle the OWGR from the golf world would be really, really difficult at this point, and that is kind of what LIVE is trying to do.
And the only way that it seems like LIV can do that is just the brute force of we're going to recruit all the best players in the world and we're going to start staging our own majors, and the rest of the tours, along with the OWGR, which is so connected with those tours, would be marginalized. That seems to be liv's play here.
And I guess I'd like to revise my answer to what benefit is the Official World Golf Rankings? And I don't know how profound this is, but I think the benefit of the Official World Golf Rankings is it's providing context, and that is across the world, what does this event mean? How good are the guys who are playing here? That's the question that it's answering. And so when you have a major and you say why is this player here, Well, that's because he was ranked forty eighth at the end
of the year. That's why he's here. The Official World Golf Rankings are providing context, and I think what you're hitting on and why this conversation is difficult and nuanced is that by having players on live that aren't ranked, we are starting to lose context, and ultimately, context is probably the answer to what the official of golf rankings is providing.
All right, Joseph, this was really interesting. Your company is called Optimal Approach Golf. Your newsletter is called Finding the Edge. I'd highly recommend Finding the Edge. I read every edition when it comes out. Thanks for coming on the podcast and talk to you again soon.
Thanks so much for having me us respond.
This episode of the Frida Egg podcast was edited by Meg Atkins. So the big thing going on at the Frida Egg right now is that we're launching a membership. It's called Club TFE and it's going to involve course reviews and ratings. It's going to involve the Club TFE blog. There's going to be all sorts of perks to the membership, like early access to events and much much more. Check out all the details in side up at the fridagg dot com slash membership. We're really excited about Club TFE
and we hope you join us. All right, thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.