Dustin Johnson, a LIV Golf Winner Again, Is 228th in the World—Is That a Problem?

LIV Golf's first two winners this season reignited chatter around nonexistent world ranking points and opportunities to play majors.

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Dustin Johnson appears ambivalently content. If he’s bothered by his 228th position in the Official World Golf Ranking prior to his victory in the LIV Golf’s League’s Las Vegas event Saturday, he is hardly emitting that vibe. (Editor's note: He dropped to No. 231 after the OWGR's latest revision following the weekend.)

Johnson, 39, never made a big fuss about much of anything when he jumped to LIV Golf in June 2022. He never disparaged the PGA Tour, was not part of any lawsuits, made a point to say he appreciated everything the Tour did for him.

He was fine with playing for a big up-front guarantee and the millions offered each week with LIV Golf, and if it meant fewer tournaments to play, great. Outside LIV Golf and the major championships, Johnson has not competed in any other worldwide tournaments.

But Johnson, a two-time major winner who has won in each of the three seasons on LIV and tied for 10th at last year’s U.S. Open, is yet another example of a system that continues to cause angst in the game.

Dustin Johnson has won an event in all three seasons of LIV Golf yet continues to plummet in the Official World Golf Ranking :: Lucas Peltier/USA TODAY Sports

Clearly he’s better than the 228th best player in the world as the OWGR says. Joaquin Niemann brought the issue to the forefront again a week ago when he won the LIV Golf event in Mexico, saying on the broadcast that he believes he can win majors.

"But I need to be in them," he said.

Jon Rahm lamented Niemann’s plight and both sides again weighed in:

The rankings are a joke if LIV players aren’t included.

LIV players knew what they were doing, they should have realized the consequences of playing for a tour that is not accredited.

And around and around we go again.

The LIV/OWGR debate has typically centered around things such as 54 holes, no cuts, a small field (48 players, now 54) and even the shotgun starts (which has nothing to do with it).

But ultimately, what it comes down to are relatively small player relegation and promotion as well as the locked fields. Peter Dawson, the former head of the R&A and the chairman of the OWGR, made this clear when the LIV application was formally denied in October.

"We are not at war with them," Dawson said in an interview with the Associated Press. "This decision not to make them eligible is not political. It is entirely technical. LIV players are self-evidently good enough to be ranked. They’re just not playing in a format where they can be ranked equitably with the other 24 tours and thousands of players who compete on them."

Dawson said that certain criteria such as 36-hole cuts and having less than a 75-player average field size were not deal breakers.

It was more the set fields from week to week. There is no weekly qualifying for LIV Golf events. It is a fixed 52 players with 13 teams. LIV has added two individuals to bring the field to 54, with Hudson Swafford expected to be one in every event. Other than an injury or a rotating 54th player, it’s the same field every week.

And that causes a math issue with the OWGR.

It gets into the weeds, but field strength is by a formula called "strokes gained world rating" for the OWGR. Strokes-gained statistics help determine how many points a player contributes to the field. In simple terms, when a group of players play in a no-cut event, the strokes gained for that event will zero out. An equal amount of strokes will be gained by some players in the field as will be lost by others. That’s true in any no cut event on any tour, not just LIV.

But LIV differs from other tours in that, with the minimal exceptions of an injury or changing out a wild card, it’s the same field every week. That means that every time LIV plays itself, the same net-zero strokes-gained effect occurs. There are no players from the outside “ecosystem” participating in the events, so comparisons to the outside are scant. That’s why field variation is critical. The addition and/or subtraction of a sufficient number of different players to the base 54 LIV roster each week would produce variation in the strokes gained of the base 54.

By contrast, a good example of field variation of limited fields was how the prior World Golf Championships were conducted. The OWGR top 50 would be exempt into all of the fields that varied in size from 64 to 78 players. But the top 50 wasn’t set to the same 50 players each time. Players could move in and out of the top 50 to qualify. Plus the additional 14 to 28 players earned entry by various criteria.

As it now stands, a LIV Golf event would see a winner get approximately 25 OWGR points if they were offered. Compare that to the PGA Tour’s WM Phoenix Open, which was slated to give 55 points to the winner. The Qatar Masters on the DP World Tour was set to get 17 points. And the Korn Ferry Tour event in Colombia was to get 14.

So LIV’s points are not insignificant but still less than half of a regular PGA Tour event and probably just 35% of a signature event.

“Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia, of course they should be in the ranking,” Dawson said last year. “We need to find a way to get that done. I hope that LIV can find a solution—not so much their format; that can be dealt with through a mathematical formula—but the qualification and relegation.”

So why the impasse?

It’s not unreasonable to point out that both sides are at fault. The OWGR’s ties to the major championships and the PGA Tour and DP World Tour (the entire board is made up of their executives) is a glaring conflict. It is not independent, and any criticism starts there.

The OWGR’s own handbook opens the door to ambiguity. There are guidelines such as a year review period, and things such as 36-hole cuts and 75-player fields being necessary. But no criteria is binding, and the OWGR’s own guidelines are followed by a disclaimer: meeting all the criteria does not guarantee approval, nor does meeting fewer mean non-approval; and the final decision is at the sole discretion of the board.

Clearly, the OWGR never envisioned a situation where it would be reviewing the case of a tour that is viewed as hostile or a competitor.

There is some evidence of LIV Golf arrogance as well. Its association with the Asian Tour—whose CEO, Cho Minn Thant, is part of the OWGR technical committee—was seen in some corners as a path to accreditation.

There was also a belief that LIV’s roster of players demanded that it be included: "How do you leave Dustin Johnson and Cam Smith out of the rankings?" Dawson echoed this point, with the caveat that LIV has a format that none of the other 24 accredited tours employ. That means the OWGR would have to "mold" its criteria to LIV’s format.

LIV Golf submitted its bid in July 2022, just a few events into its existence. A year later, the OWGR had yet to make a decision, although in correspondence with LIV Golf, it made clear that the lack of player transition was a problem and also suggested it had issues with the team format and its impact on individual play.

Given all that, the OWGR absolutely should have given a formal decision last July, one year after the application was made. The OWGR met at the British Open and could have made and announced this decision.

Then, LIV needed to immediately get with the OWGR. With the framework agreement having been announced weeks earlier, it seemed prudent then to try and work something out. LIV certainly wasn’t going away. And there is pretty much agreement that the OWGR not ranking all of the best players is a problem.

So why not sit down and come to a solution? Give LIV some specific parameters. Would weekly qualifying and roster churn help? What about six or eight players coming out of the Promotions event and two from the International Series instead of just three and one?

Give LIV the template and tell them to comply. The league would have had six months to make the changes in time for 2024 and given the rest of the track record of the league, perhaps a decision by now to grant points would have been reasonable.

Instead, LIV is left to lament its players not getting in majors. It has seemingly done nothing else to work toward complying with OWGR. It has taken to suggesting that the majors are going to be diminished and they will need to invite LIV players based on its ranking system—even though the majors do not carve out large spots for any other worldwide tour other than the PGA Tour.

So far, the major championships have shown no inclination to make big changes to their qualification processes.

The argument that LIV players "knew the consequences" or "knew they were taking a chance" is certainly valid, although there have been indications that many of the players were led to believe that getting ranking points was either assured or just a matter of time.

And that also doesn’t address the idea that for the overall good of the game, shouldn’t some of the players who pass the eyeball test of elite be in consideration for major spots?

There was hope that an agreement between the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia—LIV’s backer—might come with a resolution. So far, it’s not happened. And if there is no PIF deal, then what?

No matter what you think of the LIV format and those who are part of it, Johnson did beat 53 players this past week. Among them was Rahm, who is ranked third in the world, and Talor Gooch, LIV’s reigning player of the year. In a six-way tie with six holes to play, Johnson birdied three of them to forge ahead and win.

Even if the format elicits few points, it clearly would be worth something.

Johnson, who won the 2020 Masters, suggested Saturday he wasn’t happy with the way he played last year. He did have one LIV victory, but he was not a factor on Sunday at any of the majors and missed the cut at the British Open.

Although he appeared rusty in the season opener in Mexico, he still finished T5. Now he’s got a victory and three more LIV events prior to the Masters—unlike last year when there were just three events and he was dealing with a back injury.

There are other systems that rank LIV golfers—Data Golf, The Ultimate Golf Ranking (TUGR) and Sports Illustrated—all which use strokes-gained systems that are similar if the not the same as the OWGR's strokes gained world rating. What they don’t do is acknowledge the recurring field factor that is present in LIV events and bothersome to OWGR.

Is there a way forward?