Sports Illustrated Launches New SI World Golf Rankings, Which Will Measure and Rank Golfers From All Professional Tours

New SI World Golf Rankings use proprietary calculations to rank professional golfers. Check out our first top 100 list and learn more about the project.

Here’s the short answer: it was time.

Anyone who’s even passively followed golf for the past year knows that LIV Golf disrupted the sport in ways that were both unforeseen and unprecedented. As the dust settles on player defections from the PGA Tour to LIV and the courtroom dramas drag along, one piece to LIV Golf’s barnstorming arrival remains unsettled: the Official World Golf Ranking.

The OWGR has recently tried to repair itself: it was updated last summer to include a strokes-gained metric, a strength-of-field-metric and performance points. But many of the game’s top players – from Rory McIlroy and Phil Mickelson to Jon Rahm – have recently taken strong stances publicly, saying they no longer believe the OWGR achieves what it set out to do. (Its stated mission: to administer and publish, on a weekly basis, a transparent, credible and accurate Ranking based on the relative performances of players participating in male-eligible golf tours worldwide.)

It’s clear the OWGR is trying to improve itself, but it ignores many golfers who could claim to be among the world’s best players by shunning LIV entirely. Also, the system of awarding points for results from as far as 24 months ago seemed worth revisiting. Should, for example, Hideki Matsuyama’s April 2021 Masters win impact his ranking in February 2023?

Add it up and we decided to take corrective action. We set out to create a new world ranking that attempts to achieve two central goals:

1. Create a calculation that uses data with a more narrow time window than two years to better rank the best golfers today, and
2. Create a metric that allows us to fairly compare players across all tours.

Today we offer that new alternative: The SI World Golf Rankings (SIWGR).

To launch our list, we’ve partnered with Golf Intelligence to develop our own unique calculations. Check out our first Top 100 list and you’ll notice a few things:

• Players on all men’s pro tours receive ranking points.
• We use the most recent 12 months of player results.
• Strength of field matters.
• So does course difficulty.

You’ll find some players with an SIWGR closely aligned with the current OWGR and others who vary drastically. (For example, check out Abraham Ancer, who despite earning points for his 2022 LIV results is currently 60th in our SI World Golf Rankings but, thanks to a hot summer in 2021, still 27th in the OWGR.)

We want to show our work, so beyond the list there’s more to see. We explain our calculations here and we answer your questions here. Let us know what you think. We aim to be as clear and transparent as possible.

We also acknowledge that we’re not the first to attempt to tackle this issue: Data Golf is ambitious and impressive. The new TUGR rankings seem to have a similar spirit. A few independent Twitter accounts have gone deep on this topic. It’s all healthy and adds to the discussion. We wanted to offer our own view while creating a new calculation for it.

We’re excited about this project, but we also launch today with a weighty dose of humility – do we believe the SIWGR has solved all of golf’s ranking flaws? Of course not. Rankings are inherently ripe for analysis and debate. We aren’t claiming perfection—we are still tweaking our Course Adjustment calculations, but coming soon, you’ll see a longer list with slick, sortable functionality. Also coming soon: a women’s SI World Golf Ranking.

But today we think we have something different to add to the discussion and we look forward to being part of the debate going forward.

Thanks for checking it out. See you next Monday, and every Monday thereafter, when the SIWGR is updated anew.