The new women’s ranking system is wonderful news for curious golf fans
How do you know who the best golfers in the world really are?
Then there are the points they shoot for in the championship game. But there’s also context around it: where they’re shooting and against what level of competition. But it’s more complicated than you might think. Between the various tours, formats and tournaments played around the world, all those score matrices can make a jumble of digits on different websites and forums on the internet.
Increasingly, the solution for golf fans is the DataGolf website. Official world rankings serve their purpose but have their limitations, too, failing to account for the skill shown in eight-shot wins versus one-shot wins, or the complexity of scoring new tours (though that’s another discussion entirely). Most of the problems affecting the men’s game have been solved by DataGolf for years, but the women’s game has always lagged far behind.
But now it’s catching up.
As of this week, DataGolf now has a women’s ranking to rival its men’s ranking, a new, clearer, and cleaner way to tell if Nelly Korda really does play better golf than Jeeno Thitikul.
Essentially, the DataGolf rankings are an assessment of how a pro golfer’s results in the tournaments they play stack up against others in that field and all other fields. If you play well anywhere, it will look good on you, according to the Strokes Gained against elite-golf (PGA or LPGA Tour) rating. If you play well against a field of top golfers, it will prove a high level of skill, too. Similarly, playing badly anywhere is not good, and playing badly with a poor pitch is worst of all.
So, who’s on top of DataGolf’s women’s premiership?
It was Korda, then Thitikul, then HyoJoo Kim, the top three guys, although in a different order, like the Rolex world rankings. But the actual number of levels comes a little further down the DataGolf list. There is a significant portion of top-level women’s golf based almost entirely in Asia, and those players may not find themselves on the same course as Korda more than once or twice a season. They play most of their golf in Japan or Korea, and Korda almost never makes a trip across the Pacific Ocean. While that may be a problem for the LPGA Tour, it’s also a problem for people trying to embrace the sport. Those who try to get involved with it, follow its characters and understand the essence of each tournament every week.
DataGolf’s ninth-ranked player – just ahead of last week’s LPGA winner Hannah Green – is 23-year-old Shuri Sakuma, who has played the most players. five LPGA events in his lifetime, he is not in America. Four of them were in his home country of Japan, where he completely dominates the JLPGA. Sakuma has won four times on the JLPGA in the past 12 months, and because of this he finds himself in this week’s field at The Chevron. Sakuma is decidedly not in the same ballpark as Korda, but it may be closer than we thought before this situation arrived.
Another interesting aspect of DataGolf is how the skill index can explain the dominance of top players compared to their peers. And while we can’t really measure Scottie Scheffler’s batting prowess against Korda, each DG Index tells a similar story. Scheffler’s average of 2.96 is nearly a stroke larger than No. 2 in the men’s game, Jon Rahm (2.19), while Korda’s dominance is greater (2.7) and his lead over Thitikul is less (2.45).
Although that may not mean a ton right nowit would be nice to compare the two a few years ago, when Korda was winning every LPGA tournament … and Scheffler was doing the same on the PGA Tour. Considering basically no one was beating them, maybe us he didn’t they need any numbers to explain it better, but it’s interesting that Korda’s dominance in the women’s game actually outstripped Scheffler’s in the men’s game.
Thankfully, the people behind DataGolf have promised to release plenty of these numbers through the year 2000, with more upcoming content surrounding Annika Sorenstam and Lorena Ochoa.
Stay tuned.
