Let The Bickering Begin: Golf World's 100 Best Modern Players
/While our friends in Europe are predictably oozing with their usual xenophobia complaints, Golf World (USA) has put together a fascinating list of the 100 Best Modern Players on the PGA Tour (USA) since 1980.
The PGA Tour. Right? Are we clear so that the bickering over not doing a world 100 can be saved for elsewhere for now?
Now that we have that clear, check out Brett Avery's list built on performance metrics, with little subjectivity, some help for majors, but overall, a big reward for week-to-week excellence.
To qualify for the ranking, golfers needed three or more official PGA Tour victories since the start of the 1980 season, or two wins and at least one major championship victory.
Avery considered 1,945 individual seasons, more than 47,000 starts and 110,000 rounds and calculated the strength of each player’s performance against all other eligible players in a given season. The 1,945 individual seasons were assigned a point value, which were then averaged to determine a player’s final score.
The seasons were considered with performance metrics and versus-peers metrics. Some serious number crunching essentially!
The top ten since 1980:
1. Tiger Woods 23.047
2. Greg Norman 13.893
3. Phil Mickelson 11.329
4. Jack Nicklaus 11.281
5. Vijay Singh 10.952
6. Ernie Els 10.702
7. Tom Watson 10.318
8. David Duval 9.733
9. Rory McIlroy 9.728
10. Nick Faldo 9.651
Let the bickering begin...
