I still haven’t finished putting together what I think will be my most accurate estimation of the 2010 PGA Tour moneylist, but here is some stuff I threw together over the weekend.
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.
GOLF STATS 