AVG MONEY
A breakdown of all PGA Tournaments using the simple formula total purse divided by number of players in the field:

ROUNDS PLAYED BY SKILL
As you can see, I broke it down into four levels.

Cash Grabs: These are the WGC’s and two playoff events where there are limited fields, no cuts and guaranteed money. It’s a pretty big advantage to make it to one of these events.

Big Purse: These are your majors, PLAYERS, first two playoff events and the invitationals. Bigger purses and generally smaller fields.

Average: Run of the mill tournaments

Weak/Opposite Field: All the tournaments opposite majors and WGC’s as well as most of the fall series.

Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation between the chances that a player gets in each of the events and their relative skill level(judged by my two year rankings). I used number of rounds played in these events as the judge of opportunities in each event.


TRUE ROUNDS PLAYED
Again, not surprisingly players that are very good play less. But, that is somewhat deceiving in terms of projecting moneylist finishing positions because of the varying purse levels. Since on average a “cash grab” tournament is worth about 2.8 times per round as much as a big purse tournament that needs to be factored in.

Again, broken down by skill level, with the big purse average set as the average tournament.

So, in effect not only are the better players better at golf(duh!) they also get more opportunities to prove that in terms of money made. That was a pretty big weakness in my first estimation, which assumed all players had an equal opportunity to win money.

I’ll have my full guesses at this sometime later in the week.

There are a few assumptions:
-Everyone plays the same amount of Rounds.
-Everyone plays in tournaments with the same purse.
-Tiger Woods does not count.

Obviously, those aren’t true(I plan on looking into this more on my first college football less Saturday), but if they were, I think this would be a pretty good estimation.

This is far from perfect, but I think I can come up with some pretty good estimations based off this and factoring in a few variables over the weekend.

For the record, Using this same methodology, Tiger Woods would be about 79% to win the 2010 Money List.

Ross Fisher
As Jimbo pointed out, Fisher is much higher(18) in the OWGR’s than in my rankings(Currently 67th). There could be several reasons for this:

A) Fisher got a decent amount of World Ranking points in winning the Volvo Match Play and making the final four of the Accenture Match Play. I only count stroke play events. It’s just too hard to say in Match Play what a player scored, plus there are much fewer rounds for the week to draw an accurate field average.

B) Ross is the type of player who has some high profile really good finishes. However he also has a lot of inconsistent play mixed in as well. My rankings give no bonus to recent events or majors(other than the strength of field). I’m not saying that’s entirely right, only because I have no proof, but I think offering an objective look at the past two years, with all rounds adjusted for strength of field and weighted equally is the best way to do it.

2010 Verdict: Fisher, I believe has talent to move up in the rankings and if you factoring in 10 rounds with an estimate for the Match Play it’s fair to view him as somewhere between 45-60 in the last two years. Still if you look at the complete package, I’m not comfortable putting him ahead of players like Molinari, Sim, Noren and others who have spent much of their time away from the PGA Tour, but played more consistently overall.

More of these quick write-ups coming later, but this one directly pertained to how I do my rankings so it was worth putting up now…