Best Way to Rank Golfers

[nick1998bunker]

Im on a high school golf team and this last season I created a website that ranks the team based on performance. It was pretty fun for us and increased our conpetition to play well but I am still not sure of the best way to do the rankings. Basically I took the score differential from each round played and adjusted the course rating to accomodate for the conditions. Then we averaged the differentials and ranked for that. However, matches, tournaments and playoffs were all weighted differently. We do qualifiers to get into each event so not everybody plays the same amount. There was some anger about people who played less but played well and were ranked higher than people who played more. The other problem is some people do not play in a certain catagory of event so not everybody is weighted evenly. Some people played great all year but lost it at the playoffs and shot way down the rankings and fell behind people who had a decent showing in a scrimmage early in the season. My question is what would be the best eay to calculate a ranking for next year or how could we improve it? Our website is www.owgr.weebly.com if you want to see more information on it. 

[RandallT]

Hey NIck,

Love the site. "Official Wando Golf Rankings" Nice.

I like the idea of differentials, and it's clever that you adjust the course rating based on things like "lift/clean/place" or "play OB as water hazard." I'm a bit skeptical on the adjustment for wind and rain.  

In fact, what if you tried to run the rankings again without any of those adjustments? 

Even if the rankings did change, it seems like then people could haggle about the adjustment factors being too much or too little. So you'll never please everyone. Perhaps it's best to just let the course rating alone and then the debates can follow about "hey, your competition was good conditions and I had to play through wind and sleet. No fair!" That's part of the fun to me. Also more in the spirit of the game.

The weightings for type of round seem reasonable. Jared played more rounds than Dylan, but he's ranked worse- perhaps one bad round for Jared? Maybe for the guys who play a certain threshold of rounds, they're allowed to drop their worst round? Kind of like a handicap- where it shows how good your best scores are.

The thought there, is that in the real OWGR, you get awards for good play, but you don't get penalized for a bad round (you just get 0 points). In your system, one bad round by your best golfer could be a big setback, even though everyone knows he's the top guy, because he mostly goes lower.

Great idea and have fun with it. Just wanted to throw out alternatives.

 

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