It will not surprise you that Tiger Wood is No.1 in the Official World Golf Rankings, in recent weeks, there haven't been too many tournaments played, we wondering how long he can keep this. What may surprise you is how long he'll hold this rank.
In his column today, ESPN.com's Jason Sobel notes that "according to those who run the OWGR, if Tiger Woods continues his leave of absence into the summer, he likely won't lose his No. 1 status until June or July." There are six months from now and eight months from Tiger played a tournament last time.
Now, we all know that Tiger has put some distance between himself and the competition -- his ranking of 14.13 is nearly double second-place Phil Mickelson's 7.95, it is so high, and taking more than half a year off doesn't pull him down. Sobel thinks that's too much latitude to give a golfer, and I think that is right. It's stupid, like if one conference in college football didn't play a conference championship and so avoided the tough end-of-season test before skating into the bowls.
The World Ranking Points for each player are accumulated over a two year "rolling" period with the points awarded for each event maintained for a 13-week period to place additional emphasis on recent performances - ranking points are then reduced in equal decrements for the remaining 91 weeks of the two year Ranking period. Each player is then ranked according to his average points per tournament, which is determined by dividing his total number of points by the tournaments he has played over that two-year period. There is a minimum divisor of 40 tournaments over the two year ranking period and a maximum divisor of a player's last 60 events.
Mention of "divisor." That two-year provision seems to be the key point -- the idea is not to penalize a player too much for one brief bad patch. But as Sobel notes, by that standard you'd be including Tiger's two recent layoffs -- knee-induced and hydrant-induced -- and that by the middle of this season, assuming he didn't return, he'd have played only 19 events over the last two years. "Tiger Woods’ average points figure will drop each week he doesn't play and it will take until somewhere between the U.S. Open and Open Championship for his average to drop to where Phil Mickelson's currently is," the OWGR indicated. "If Mickelson plays well enough to maintain his current average and Woods doesn't play, then the No. 1 spot could change hands early July." And that's only if Phil continues to play well.
Some people say that Tiger is a wounded right now, that gave other golfers a big chance, and all the other golfers are gathering around, they want to bring him down. And when he was break, I'll bet he falls right on Rory Sabbatini.
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