OWGR Strength of Field

How the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR) All Started

The Official World Golf Ranking was introduced in 1986 (Bernhard Langer became the first official World No. 1). It came about as a solution to an emerging international game with some of the world’s dominate players coming from outside the PGA Tour.

The rankings main premise works by awarding OWGR points to players based on their finishing position at events on any of 23 eligible tours. The points are then averaged, and the golfer with the highest average is deemed the best in the world.

The number of points awarded to competing golfers varies depending on the event and its field. The focus of this article is to better understand how this number of points is determined. Since the early 90s, the OWGR adopted a Strength of Field metric which indicated how competitive a tournament’s field was. The higher an event’s Strength of Field, the more difficult it is assumed to win or place highly in the event; therefore, a greater points distribution exists.

As stated by owgr.com, the Strength of Field is the sum of two additional ratings: the World Rating and the Home Tour Rating. Both these ratings are associated with charts that assign point values based on the world ranking of each player in the field. The World Rating is based on the Official World Golf Ranking as calculated in the week prior to the event. The Home Tour Rating uses a ranking dependent upon the tour within which the event is hosted; that tour’s unique ranking, based on its rankings set at the end of the previous year’s season, serves as the ranking for the Home Tour Rating.

The PGA Tour uses the FedEx Cup Standings for its Home Tour Rating, the European Tour uses the Race to Dubai Standings, and internationally hosted events such as the Olympics and World Golf Championships revert to the Official World Ranking same as the World Rating.

The aforementioned charts, as shown below, are to be used for each player and his rank in the field and the corresponding points are totaled to create the World Rating and Home Tour Rating, respectively.

Confused a bit? Don’t worry. The following example should help clear things up.

Earlier this year, at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, there were 132 players in the field. We’ll start by calculating the field’s World Rating. The Greenest Show on Grass was hosted during week 6 of the Official World Golf Rankings. Since the World Rating is evaluated based on the prior week’s OWGR, we need to reference week 5’s ranking.

The below table lists all players and their respective OWGR in week 5 of 2021. (The order is not significant but matches the event’s final leaderboard.)

Let’s add the World Rating points in accordance with the World Rating Chart from above.

As can be seen, Brooks Koepka’s week 5 OWGR of 13th corresponded to a World Rating of 14 points. Similarly, Jordan Spieth’s rank of 92nd (aka, before his resurgence) added 2 World Rating points to the metric’s total. Overall, the total World Rating was 418.

Now for the Home Tour Rating

Remember, since the Waste Management Phoenix Open was an event on the PGA Tour, the home tour ranking is the FedEx Cup Standings as set after the 2020 Tour Championship won by Dustin Johnson. Below is this ranking:

Using this top 30 ranking list and the Home Tour Rating chart, we can find the Home Tour points for all 132 golfers.

The process follows suit with that of calculating the World Rating, yielding a total of 45 points. Add these to the 418 World Rating points, and the Strength of Field is 463.

Now What?

With the Strength of Field computed, how does it relate to the points golfers earn at events? Well, the OWGR uses the following distribution table to decide the world ranking points to be awarded to a tournament’s finishing positions:

Simple, right? If you look across the top of the chart, you will see ranges such as 1 to 5, 6 to 10, 11 to 15 – all the way up to 906 to 100. Whichever range contains a tournament’s Strength of Field corresponds to the point distribution. Also, the rows below these ranges depict the OWGR points to be awarded to every finishing position. In our example, with a Strength of Field of 463, the Waste Management Phoenix Open fell in the range of 436 to 465, meaning the winner, Brooks Koepka, earned 58 world ranking points.

The complete point breakdown for the entire field, as confirmed, is shown below:

Notice that second place finishers Xander Schauffele and Kyoung-Hoon Lee each received 29 points. While this seems contradictory to the distribution chart which indicates second receives 34.8 points, the tie in the second position requires additional calculations. As is done with all ties, the points for each position in which the tie occurs are averaged. In this case, the two positions in which the tie occurred was second and third. Second’s 34.8 and third’s 23.2 average to 29, concurring with the actual figures.

Some Caveats

Okay, as if that wasn’t complicated enough, there are some caveats to this system, particularly in the minimum point distribution level at designated events. Looking back to the distribution table, some of the cells containing the ranges also include the names of golf tours or specific events. For the range 91 to 105, the text “EUR, USA Min” indicate that regardless of a field’s strength, events hosted by either the European or PGA Tours will fall into this range.

At the Puerto Rico Open this year, the Strength of Field was only 28. Based on the table, first place should have received just 12 OWGR points. However, as a PGA Tour event, the event could not fall below the 91 to 105 range, and its winner, Branden Grace received 24 OWGR points in accordance with that minimum range.

The last two cells of the ranges row are USA Flagship Min and Major Championships. Similar to above, the USA Flagship Tournament (The Players Championship) is locked into at least the 906 to 1000 range. By that same token all the majors, regardless of the field, will offer the most points of any event. The same can be deduced from the other text included with other ranges.