OWGR - Week #38

A bit of an anticlimactic final week for this FedEx Cup for me, I have to say... and that has nothing to do with the fact that this minuscule field swallows almost twice as many OWGR points as the entire PGA Latinoamerica tour all year...
Having said that, very happy for Brandt Snedeker, a brilliant putter and a very nice guy! So there he is, climbing for the first time in his carreer inside the top 10 in the world. Justin Rose had a very good week as well, and this runner up place is good enough to bring him now to #5 in the rankings, a great achievement for him! Other than that, I guess Ryan Moore and Scott Piercy are two other notable movers this week, both climbing up inside the top 50...

Congratulations also to Masanori Kobayashi, winner of the Panasonic Open in Japan, one of the bigger events in that part of the world, moving up to somewhere around #230. A great story and a great win for the young French amateur Julien Brun, who won the Challenge Tour event in Toulouse, making a grand entry into the owgr, straight somewhere around #525. And finally well done once again to Luke Guthrie, winner for the 2nd consecutive week on the Web.com Tour. Amazing ascension from the 22 year old Illinois man, climbing now all the way to around #120 in the world, and the way he's been playing, who could bet against him moving very soon inside the top 100. Talking of which, it's bye-bye top 100 for Gary Woodland, after a year to forget...

The OWGR table after week #38 and before the Ryder Cup, should look as follows:

1 Rory McIlroy
2 Tiger Woods
3 Luke Donald
4 Lee Westwood
5 Justin Rose
6 Adam Scott
7 Bubba Watson
8 Webb Simpson
9 Jason Dufner
10 Brandt Snedeker
-------------------------
11 Louis Oosthuizen
12 Steve Stricker
13 Dustin Johnson
14 Keegan Bradley
15 Matt Kuchar
16 Phil Mickelson
17 Zach Johnson
18 Graeme McDowell
19 Sergio Garcia
20 Hunter Mahan
21 Nick Watney
22 Ernie Els
23 Jim Furyk
24 Bo Van Pelt
25 Peter Hanson
26 Ian Poulter
27 Rickie Fowler
28 Paul Lawrie
29 Charl Schwartzel
30 Jason Day
31 Francesco Molinari
32 Martin Kaymer
33 Carl Pettersson
34 Bill Haas
35 Nicolas Colsaerts
36 John Senden
37 Gonzalo Fdez-C.
38 David Toms
39 David Lynn
40 K.J. Choi
41 Robert Garrigus
42 Thomas Bjorn
43 Geoff Ogilvy
44 Martin Laird
45 Fredrik Jacobson
46 Ryan Moore
47 Rafael Cabrerra-Bello
48 Scott Piercy
49 Aaron Baddeley
50 Bae Sang-Moon
---------------------------
51 Jamie Donaldson
52 Simon Dyson
53 Bud Cauley
54 Greg Chalmers
55 Kyle Stanley
56 Anders Hansen
57 Padraig Harrington
58 Richie Ramsay
59 Marcel Siem
60 Kevin Na
61 Alvaro Quiros
62 Branden Grace
63 Mark Wilson
64 John Huh
65 Jonathan Byrd
66 Ben Crane
67 Hiroyuki Fujita
68 Vijay Singh
69 Marcus Fraser
70 Alexander Noren
71 Kim Kyung-Tae
72 Pablo Larazabal
73 Ben Curtis
74 Bernd Wiesberger
75 Robert Karlsson
76 Michael Thompson
77 Mark Leishman
78 Matteo Manassero
79 Retief Goosen
80 Tim Clark
81 Johnson Wagner
82 Robert Rock
83 Miguel Jimenez
84 Jeff Overton
85 Ryo Ishikawa
86 Noh Seung-Yul
87 Rory Sabbatini
88 Jeev Milkha Singh
89 Ted Potter Jr.
90 Ryan Palmer
91 Thorbjorn Olesen
92 George Coetzee
93 Y.E. Yang
94 D.A. Points
95 Spencer Levin
96 Charles Howell III
97 Toru Taniguchi
98 Joost Luiten
99 Anders Romero
100 J.B. Holmes
-----------------------
101 Gary Woodland
102 Brian Davis
103 Chris Kirk
...

They got rankings points for that debacle?

PD,

Please tell me Westwood got a zero for +15 and last place..............

I'm afraid I can't tell you that JC, he got 2.8 OWGR pts on top of the $628,000 in cash for his troubles last week. Nice job if you can get it...

Giving points to players for turning up to events really does grate with me...............2.8 points is a lot of points to give to someone who finished last on +15..........in fact at the Italian Open, you needed 14th position and -15 to accrue 2.8 World Ranking points

An otherwise fine ranking system is let down by the points given out at limited field events........................no wonder it's so hard to move out of the Top 50 once you get in..................

If we are assuming that Rory is British...or at the very least has a British passport is this the forst time 4 out of the top 5 players in the OWGR have been Brits ?

Diggers wrote:If we are assuming that Rory is British...or at the very least has a British passport is this the forst time 4 out of the top 5 players in the OWGR have been Brits ?

Good question. I like the NornIron pronunciation of first there, btw.

Im always at my funniest when its unintentional Smithers.

to be sure to be sure, Oi tink dat it is.

This reminded me of that joke... "What's a quark? It's the sound made by a posh duck..."

About Diggers point on the 4 out of the top 5 from UK... without checking anything in detail, I'd be >99.9% sure that this is the first time that's happened. Before this Westood/Donald/McIlroy/etc... era in the last couple of years, there have been only two UK guys who ever reached #1 since the rankings were introduced, Faldo and Woosnam, and in the period when they were dominant, for most of the time you'd be lucky if you could find 4 UK guys inside the top 30 or even top 50, let alone the top 5...

PD, did Sandy Lyle not get to World No 1 for a short time back around 1988/89?

Tinmar, Lyle did spend quit a bit of time at #2 in that period, but was always behind Norman and he never got to #1... Here is the list of former #1's:

- TIGER WOODS (623 weeks)
- GREG NORMAN (331 weeks)
- NICK FALDO (97 weeks)
- SEVE BALLESTEROS (61 weeks)
- LUKE DONALD (56 weeks)
- IAN WOOSNAM (50 weeks)
- NICK PRICE (44 weeks)
- VIJAY SINGH (32 weeks)
- LEE WESTWOOD (22 weeks)
- FRED COUPLES (16 weeks)
- DAVID DUVAL (15 weeks)
- RORY MCILROY (14 weeks)
- ERNIE ELS (9 weeks)
- MARTIN KAYMER (8 weeks)
- BERNHARD LANGER (3 weeks)
- TOM LEHMAN (1 week)

...actually just looking at that list now, Rory is guarranteed to pass Duval and Couples in the next few weeks, and even though that's not guarranteed, it would be pretty safe to say that he'll probably pass Lee as well before the end of the year...

Thanks for that.

I remember reading somewhere that IMG had their own unofficial rankings going back to some time in the 1960s. Apparently Jack Nicklaus was almost permanently No 1 from the start until about 1980. It would be interesting to know if his total would have surpassed Tiger's 623.

I would imagine Tom Watson would have been No 1 for a while also and Seve's total weeks would have been a lot more than 61.

Points should not given to players that do not finish in the top half of limited field events like TC, RTD, Chevron, and Nedbank.

I thought Luke had a chance to take the #2 spot if Justin had doubled the last hole, but it turns out he would have been short.

Westy, Oosty, and DJ among the notables in the Dunhill Links in two weeks.

That's true Tinmar, Mark McCormack from IMG first came up with the seeds of the golf ranking system in the 60s and some of his original core ideas are still at the foundations of the current system. Jack was the first #1 in that system in 1968 and I understand that he stayed there at the top more or less until 1978 when Watson became #1 and then Seve moved at the top in around 1983...

Every year they give away the Mark McCormack Award for the player who spends most weeks at #1 owgr in a calendar year...

Robert Karlsson the highest ranked competitor in this week's web.com, reflecting the fact that his career is at a crossroads. Nick O'Hern in the same boat and also in the field. No Guthrie this week.

I always think of Nick O Teen when O'Hern is mentioned.

What ever happened to Chris Di Marco, Charles Howell, JB Holmes, Boo Weekely (probably huntin' and fishun') etc. Seems like loads of Americans just dropped of the radar.

princedracula wrote:This reminded me of that joke... "What's a quark? It's the sound made by a posh duck..."

two ducks flying over Dublin
One said "quack"
The other said "m goin' as quack as a can"

That's a pretty bad Dublin accent, barragan. Even for a duck...

Karlsson seemed to be a bit disorriented lately, or maybe desperate... Can't quite understand what his plans are, if there are any... but if we're to believe his last tweet, "the golf feels fun again". Let's hope so, it'll be a terrible pitty for a plaayer of his caliber to end his carreer in a disarray...

In other news, I see Ben Curtis is taking the Rickie Fowler route and will play in KJ's event in Korea next week...

pd,
Snap!
Robbie Karlsson makes his US home in Charlotte so no real surprise he would tee it up there - solid start and let's hope he can build on it.
In many ways the best golfer from Sweden, though perhaps Parnevik and Stenson might quibble with that; even Pettersson if he carries on at this rate.

Nice round by one RK (Knox) today, not so good by another RK (Karlsson).

And they'll be playing next week as well, in Las Vegas.

Decent field, in a Fall Series sort of way, Garrigus, Watney, Tim Clark, and a majority of the Tour's better players who didn't cash in the FedEx Tour Champo. Shame there's no Martin Laird - he's only had a win and a runner-up there, you'd think he'd support it, but perhaps he thinks it's now beneath him. He's slip-sliding his way out of the top fifty and must hope he cashes in at the Dunhill.
Davis, Christian, Owen, Knox, Karlsson and Freddie Jac will be in Las Vegas too.

Oh well, who likes Ryder Cup anyway... (sour grapes )

kwini, w/ or w/o Lairdy, Las Vegas looks on the up this year, could reach even 30 pts level with some luck (24 last year). As for the Alfred Dunhill, probably a 48(ish) pointer (down from 54 last year). Although with Michael Phelps now confirmed in the field there, that could shoot up to 148!