Sports Illustrated Launches New World Golf Rankings That Includes LIV

On Wednesday, Sports Illustrated announced its own World Golf Rankings project. Endeavoring to provide as accurate a snapshot of the landscape of golf as possible, this will be different from the Official World Golf Rankings in two key ways. One, SI's formula only encompasses the last 12 months, whereas the OWGR's data set goes back 24 months. Two, the OWGR notably exclude LIV players and LIV events. Sports Illustrated will not only include them but base their ranking off last year's events.

From the release:

The SI World Golf Rankings seek to address concerns about the widely utilized world rankings system and offer an alternative that:

- Reflects the importance of measuring results from the most immediate 12 months, whereas current world rankings include tournament results as far back as two years ago.

- Leverages data and a proprietary formula to evaluate player performance, inclusive of the competition across all tours.

Partnering with Golf Intelligence, the rankings weigh 12 months of player results along with calculations for strength-of-field and course difficulty. All professional golfers will continue to accrue points in 2023 and LIV golfers receive points for events they played in 2022. While it will initially rank the top 100 players in men’s golf, it will soon expand to be larger and a women’s ranking is slated for release at a later date.

SI included the new top-15 rankings according to their formula. Jon Rahm, unsurprisingly, takes the top spot as an added bonus following his win at the Genesis Invitational last weekend.

1. Jon Rahm
2. Scottie Scheffler
3. Rory McIlroy
4. Will Zalatoris
5. Patrick Cantlay
6. Cameron Smith
7. Max Homa
8. Xander Schauffele
9. Justin Thomas
10. Tony Finau
11. Collin Morikawa
12. Matthew Fitzpatrick
13. Dustin Johnson
14. Cameron Young
15. Tom Kim

It is an ambitious project for SI and one that, if anything, will prove helpful for casual fans who are not knees-deep in the LIV conversation. It will definitely be interesting to see how the formula ranks the level of competition and difficulty of courses compared to the PGA.

Si is clearly investing in golf content between this and their purchase of Morning Read last year. These new rankings will be published every Monday and analyzed by the publication's golf insiders.

Just like the OGWR these rankings will not be the end-all be-all data points used to determine who is better than who and all that. It's merely additional information to help contextualize what's happening out on the course for the rest of us. And the more info we have, the better.