How do you know who the best players in the world really are?
There are, of course, the results they score in tournament competitions. But there’s also the surrounding context: where they shot them and at what level of competition. But it’s more complex than you might think. Between the various tournaments, formats and tournaments played across the globe, all those point matrices can create a confusing mess of numbers on various websites and online platforms.
Increasingly, a solution for golf fans is the website DataGolf. The official world rankings serve their purpose, but they also have their limitations, not taking into account the skill shown in winning by eight shots against one, or the complexity of scoring new tournaments (though that’s another conversation). Most of the issues that contextualize the men’s game have been solved by DataGolf for years, but the women’s game has always lagged far behind.
But now it’s catching on.
Starting this week, DataGolf now has a women’s ranking to rival it ranking of menthe newer, clearer, cleaner way to explain whether Nelly Korda really is playing better golf than Jeeno Thitikul.
Basically, the DataGolf ranking is an evaluation of how a professional golfer scores in tournaments played against others on that course, as well as on any other course. If you play well anywhere, it will look good on you in terms of strokes gained against an elite golf average (PGA or LPGA Tour). If you play well against a field of elite players, it will also prove a higher skill level. Similarly, playing poorly anywhere is not good, and playing poorly against a low-quality field is the worst of all.
So who tops DataGolf’s inaugural women’s rankings?
It’s Korda, then Thitikul, then HyoJoo Kim, same top three, though in a different order, like Rolex World Ranking. But the real value of the ranking comes a little further down the DataGolf list. There is a significant portion of top-level women’s golf that is based almost entirely in Asia, and those players may not find themselves on the same course as Korda more than once or twice a season. They play a lot of golf in Japan or Korea, and Korda almost never makes the trip across the Pacific Ocean. While this may be an issue for the LPGA Tour, it’s also a problem for people trying to embrace the sport. Those who try to engage with it follow its characters and understand the context of each tournament each week.
DataGolf’s ninth-ranked player – just ahead of last week’s LPGA winner Hannah Green – is 23-year-old Shuri Sakuma, who has played a total five LPGA events in her entire life, none of them in America. Four of those have been in her native Japan, where she absolutely dominates the JLPGA. Sakuma has won four times on the JLPGA in the last 12 months, and as a result finds himself in this week’s field at Chevron. Sakuma is definitely not in the same ballpark as Korda, but she might be closer than we would have thought before this ranking came along.
Another fun feature of DataGolf is how the skill index can explain the dominance of top players relative to their peers. And while we’ll never be able to properly measure Scottie Scheffler’s batting brilliance against Korda’s, the DG Index for each tells a similar story. Scheffler’s 2.96 rating is almost a stroke higher than No. 2 in the men’s game Jon Rahm (2.19), while Korda’s dominance is not as great (2.7) and her lead over Thitikul is narrower (2.45).
While this may not sound a fair tone nowit would have been great to compare the two a few years ago, when Korda was winning basically every LPGA tour … and Scheffler was doing the same on the PGA Tour. Considering basically no one was beating them, maybe us he didn’t some numbers are needed to explain it better, but this is plausible Korda’s dominance in the women’s game it was actually outpacing Scheffler’s in the men’s game.
Thankfully, the folks behind DataGolf have promised to date many of these numbers back to 2000, with some upcoming content about Annika Sorenstam and Lorena Ochoa’s all-time hitting streaks.
Stay tuned.
