LIV Golf Now Closed?

[iacas]

LIV Golf denied World Ranking points | Golf News and Tour Information | GolfDigest.com

LIV Golf’s application to receive Official World Golf Ranking points has been denied, according to reports from the Associated Press and Global Golf Post.

The OWGR board sent LIV Golf officials, including LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman, the notice Tuesday morning. Sources had originally told Golf Digest that the Saudi-backed league had faced questions over its “competitive integrity,” and it appears those questions remain. According to GGP, the OWGR cited two broad areas for its decision: The 54-hole, no-cut format of 48-player fields, and both the limited access for players to join LIV and limited relegation for players who underperform.

It's worth reading the whole article, though.

[StuM]

1 hour ago, iacas said:

LIV Golf denied World Ranking points | Golf News and Tour Information | GolfDigest.com

LIV Golf’s application to receive Official World Golf Ranking points has been denied, according to reports from the Associated Press and Global Golf Post.

The OWGR board sent LIV Golf officials, including LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman, the notice Tuesday morning. Sources had originally told Golf Digest that the Saudi-backed league had faced questions over its “competitive integrity,” and it appears those questions remain. According to GGP, the OWGR cited two broad areas for its decision: The 54-hole, no-cut format of 48-player fields, and both the limited access for players to join LIV and limited relegation for players who underperform.

It's worth reading the whole article, though.

I like the way they worded it "can they be ranked equitably with other tours" given the limited field, no cut line & only 54 holes.  To me the main issue is the limited field, only LIV Players, means that a whole lot of very good golfers are not in any of the events.  Basically, you can be the big fish in a small pond but that does not make you a true big fish.  "Strength of Field" is relevant for OWGR points which is why the majors get more points that other tournaments and LIV simply cannot offer the strength of field.

 

 

[iacas]

35 minutes ago, StuM said:

I like the way they worded it "can they be ranked equitably with other tours" given the limited field, no cut line & only 54 holes.  To me the main issue is the limited field, only LIV Players, means that a whole lot of very good golfers are not in any of the events.  Basically, you can be the big fish in a small pond but that does not make you a true big fish.  "Strength of Field" is relevant for OWGR points which is why the majors get more points that other tournaments and LIV simply cannot offer the strength of field.

The fields are stale and there’s no real clear established way to get into them or fall out of them.

[StuM]

17 minutes ago, iacas said:

The fields are stale and there’s no real clear established way to get into them or fall out of them.

"Stale" is a good way to put it.  

[mdl]

I am 100% in favor of refusing to do a favor to the Saudis. But they should just say that. This reads like bullshit rationalization on top of a political decision. It wouldn't be that hard to hire someone like Broadie to leverage majors – where players from PGA, Euro, and LIV all compete – to estimate a strength and depth of field and the effects of tour and tournament structure to weight and structure WGR points per finishing position per tournament on each tour accordingly in a fair way.

Honestly that would even be better! We all know that LIV competition is a joke with a tiny number of real talents at the top and then a bunch of has beens and AAAA players. From a statistical model we'd have specific numbers to show it. You'd get a small fraction of WGR points for a LIV win versus a PGA win, and effectively zero points for finishing outside the top 3 or 7 or something like that at a LIV event. So then all LIV players who don't finish top 5-10 at every major would fall out of the top 75 or top 100 in the world and LIV would officially be a joke unless they can lure more PGA players.

[iacas]

41 minutes ago, mdl said:

This reads like bullshit rationalization on top of a political decision.

I disagree.

It’s tough to properly rank an effectively almost closed system.

[DaveP043]

49 minutes ago, mdl said:

I am 100% in favor of refusing to do a favor to the Saudis. But they should just say that. This reads like bullshit rationalization on top of a political decision.

I disagree on two points.  First, if the OWGR wants to be seen as valid, they can't pick and choose which tours to accept based on the financing of each tour, or the politics of the sources of the money.  And second, this doesn't sound political, it sounds like the OWGR organization evaluated the LIV application based on the criteria that they've had in place for at least a little while.  LIV golf chose a format and a method of selecting the players that was inconsistent with the OWGR criteria, and now complains.  The big brains behind the LIV Tour should really have known better.

[mdl]

@iacas and @DaveP043 both fair points.

To Erik's point, for sure the overlapping data – majors with only a few LIV players in each and only since LIV players started competing in majors – is not extensive. That makes estimation of relative difficulty of placing in a LIV event versus other tours more variable. But IMO it wouldn't be that hard to overcome those issues and estimate a fair set of relative points. Off the top of my head you could anchor on the world rankings distribution of LIV players when they joined versus that on other tours. Allow the estimates to drift from those implied by that relatively slowly over time as more majors data comes in. Do a separate analysis on depth of field and the effects of the different format to construct the distribution of points across the rank where a player finished a tournament. As in, a PGA tour event might give out 15, 12, 10, 8, 8, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6 points for places 1 through 10. You might estimate the total strength of field on LIV is 1/10 that of the PGA. But instead of giving the above points * 0.1, because of the week depth of field and tournament format, you give 2.5, 1.7, 1.4, 0.8, 0.7, 0.4, 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.2. IOW, almost all the points go to the top finishers.

To Dave's point, I guess what I'm saying is that feels political. Like, those specs from the WGR were basically written to accommodate the various versions of format across what were recognized as legit tours at the time WGR was imagined. It feels like a technical cop out to say that a new tour with some truly top tier players doesn't fit the specs designed to fit existing tours from the time of conception. I'm advocating just doing the statistics to give them the WGR points they deserve, which would be a satisfyingly tiny number

[DaveP043]

6 minutes ago, mdl said:

I'm advocating just doing the statistics to give them the WGR points they deserve, which would be a satisfyingly tiny number

But this goes back to the first point, without some level of intermingling of players, it must be nearly impossible to develop meaningful statistical models.  LIV isn't planning to open up to players beyond the 48 they've chosen, and LIV players aren't planning to commit to the number of tournaments required to be members of other tours.  I'm not saying you can't develop some type of model, just that by developing a model without data to test it against, the model isn't very likely to be meaningful or appropriate.  Its just guesswork.  And of course, LIV will complain that their tournaments get WAY too few points, just because.

[iacas]

4 hours ago, mdl said:

It wouldn't be that hard to hire someone like Broadie to leverage majors – where players from PGA, Euro, and LIV all compete – to estimate a strength and depth of field and the effects of tour and tournament structure to weight and structure WGR points per finishing position per tournament on each tour accordingly in a fair way.

Yes, it would. There's not much overlap, and since it's been two years now, there's going to be even less overlap, as many of the lesser LIV players not named Brooks, Bryson, or Dustin are even eligible to play in many majors anymore.

3 hours ago, mdl said:

 

To Erik's point, for sure the overlapping data – majors with only a few LIV players in each and only since LIV players started competing in majors – is not extensive.

Exactly.

3 hours ago, mdl said:

But IMO it wouldn't be that hard to overcome those issues and estimate a fair set of relative points.

This stuff isn't really a matter of opinion, though. It's a matter of the mathematics. There's not a lot of overlap, and there's already stuff like the Sagarin rankings.

The thing is… other tours have:

• Relegation and promotion/qualifying.
• 72 holes
• Constant intermixing of players.

The LIV Tour has none of those things, and so how do you rank a player on LIV who doesn't play much of anything outside of LIV events.

3 hours ago, mdl said:

Off the top of my head you could anchor on the world rankings distribution of LIV players when they joined versus that on other tours.

No, you can't. DJ isn't the player he was when he joined. Cam Smith is not the player he was when he joined. Heck, neither is Brooks (potentially toward the positive).

3 hours ago, mdl said:

You might estimate the total strength of field on LIV is 1/10 that of the PGA. But instead of giving the above points * 0.1, because of the week depth of field and tournament format, you give 2.5, 1.7, 1.4, 0.8, 0.7, 0.4, 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.2. IOW, almost all the points go to the top finishers.

But… that's not really a formula. That's just making things up.

3 hours ago, mdl said:

To Dave's point, I guess what I'm saying is that feels political.

I don't think so. They don't meet the well established criteria. Occam's Razor.

3 hours ago, mdl said:

It feels like a technical cop out to say that a new tour with some truly top tier players doesn't fit the specs designed to fit existing tours from the time of conception.

But which came first? The criteria has been established.

3 hours ago, DaveP043 said:

But this goes back to the first point, without some level of intermingling of players, it must be nearly impossible to develop meaningful statistical models.

Yep.

3 hours ago, DaveP043 said:

I'm not saying you can't develop some type of model, just that by developing a model without data to test it against, the model isn't very likely to be meaningful or appropriate.  Its just guesswork.  And of course, LIV will complain that their tournaments get WAY too few points, just because.

Yeah. You won't satisfy anyone, and yet… you're going out of your way to ignore your own criteria just to accommodate a Tour that's tried five different ways of circumventing your criteria, lied about whether they'd get points, and all sorts of things.

[mdl]

3 hours ago, DaveP043 said:

But this goes back to the first point, without some level of intermingling of players, it must be nearly impossible to develop meaningful statistical models.  LIV isn't planning to open up to players beyond the 48 they've chosen, and LIV players aren't planning to commit to the number of tournaments required to be members of other tours.  I'm not saying you can't develop some type of model, just that by developing a model without data to test it against, the model isn't very likely to be meaningful or appropriate.  Its just guesswork.  And of course, LIV will complain that their tournaments get WAY too few points, just because.

Ha. Fair. As a professional in data science and machine learning with my grad work in statistics, you're right I should probably be more circumspect about how confident we could be in any model estimates given how thin the overlap is without having looked at the data, simulated for sensitivity, etc...  But what's the internet for if not for being wildly more confident online than you would be in a professional capacity

[iacas]

1 hour ago, mdl said:

Ha. Fair. As a professional in data science and machine learning with my grad work in statistics, you're right I should probably be more circumspect about how confident we could be in any model estimates given how thin the overlap is without having looked at the data, simulated for sensitivity, etc...  But what's the internet for if not for being wildly more confident online than you would be in a professional capacity

The fear is of course that if you don't get the ratings right, they'll either continue to escalate too highly or to fall too low. The bad rating will propagate throughout.

[turtleback]

23 hours ago, mdl said:

Ha. Fair. As a professional in data science and machine learning with my grad work in statistics, you're right I should probably be more circumspect about how confident we could be in any model estimates given how thin the overlap is without having looked at the data, simulated for sensitivity, etc...  But what's the internet for if not for being wildly more confident online than you would be in a professional capacity

Ah, the argument from authority fallacy.

But why should they change their whole system to accomodate some little backwater tour?

[Flipped]

Phil Mickelson

@PhilMickelson

Trevor, LIV was NEVER going to get points. Why? 1)it’s a monopoly run by all the governing bodies 2) the PGA Tour tv contract is based on owgr criteria for them to get all their money 3) they would lose leverage in negotiations if LIV got points4) last but not least, Tour has BORROWED against the tv deal! If they don’t hit their bench marks and don’t get all their tv money(from CBS 🙂 they will have an immediate capital call. Don’t believe me? Ask Sean McManus

[Vinsk]

Poor Phil. He’s showing again that he’s not near as smart as he thinks he is. And I do feel he’s really struggling with his irrelevancy.

[Vinsk]

39,000 Steps At A LIV Golf Party In Trumpland | Defector

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DORAL — Airplanes scream overhead, low and loud, landing gear deployed, casting darting shadows over the...

Pretty good read. I think LIV supporters, including Phil, still think that people who don’t like LIV are just influenced by the PIF involvement. They can’t seem to accept that the product, regardless of the PIF funding, sucks. I don’t wanna see professional golf presented in the way they do it. Period.

[Vinsk]

$600M. In this really gonna happen?

[iacas]

20 minutes ago, Vinsk said:

$600M. In this really gonna happen?

"Even though it's a rumor I'm 99.9% sure…"

Okay buddy.

I think there are a few things holding Jon back from this.

• Nobody watches.
• Ryder Cup?
• Legacy/etc.
• Their schedule kinda stinks, too, and you HAVE to play when they say you do.

$600M is a lot, though. I'm pretty sure that number is just made up, but… He could play inconsequential golf and basically play out the contract (three years?) and if he got the money up front, or will get at least $400M of it… retire really easily by 2026.

So, whatever. If he leaves, I won't see him play much golf anymore.

Cam Smith just missed the cut at his dinky Australian tournament by NINE.