ORLANDO, Fla. — Xander Schauffele looks at LIV Golf League's lineup and believes there are several players worthy of a high ranking in the game, certainly above where they are in the Official World Golf Ranking.
He applauded the decision made by the Masters to invite Joaquin Niemann, who has won two of the three LIV Golf events this year and was extended a special exemption from Augusta National and Monday got another for the PGA Championship.
But Schauffele, currently ranked fifth in the OWGR, believes the situation to not include the league boils down to it not meeting the guidelines set forth.
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“It seems that they haven't met the criteria,” Schauffele said at the Bay Hill Club, where he is competing in this week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. “I haven't read too much of it, to be completely honest, but it seems that they're not seeing sort of eye to eye on making an exemption to make LIV have World Ranking points.”
LIV Golf said Tuesday that it is abandoning its efforts to obtain OWGR accreditation and pulling the application it first made in July 2022. Last October, the OWGR announced that it was not approving the bid and it remains unclear if LIV Golf ever submitted a new one.
Greg Norman, the LIV Golf commissioner, said in a letter to players that he felt the OWGR was no longer credible and that even if players were to receive points, they are too far removed from the current system for them to regain any level of accuracy.
Asked if the system is broken, Patrick Cantlay, a member of the PGA Tour Policy Board, said: “I think the World Rankings has a very particular set of criteria, and I don't know if broken is the right word, but I think that there's been so much uncertainty and change in the last couple years that it's inevitable that things need to be updated or things need to be changed.
“I don't know if we've worked through all the changes necessary, compared to all the changes that have happened in the last couple years.”
In late 2022, after several years of study, the OWGR updated its system to incorporate a strokes-gained world rating for each player that is used to give points to every player in a specific worldwide tournament.
It also eliminated various point minimums given to worldwide tours and took away the criteria in which fields were only rated based on those players ranked among the top 200 in the world.
The shift has seen the PGA Tour benefit the most: it generally has the strongest fields and full fields are going to get more points than those that are limited. The result is that of the top 50 players in the OWGR, only four are not PGA Tour members: LIV golfers Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton, Brooks Koepka and Cam Smith.
The fact that players such as Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Talor Gooch are well outside of even the top 100 in the world has seen a bevy of complaints from LIV Golf.
“Whatever that may look like, this is sort of the structure it is right now with no OWGR,” Schauffele said. “It just seemed like it was a pretty clear thing to start sort of how it was going to look and, unfortunately, they didn't meet the criteria.
“But the LIV Tour definitely has really good players, and players that are in the top 10 or top 25 in the world, and there's many of ’em. So, they’re just sort of unranked right now, but to me, I do believe they’re definitely top-ranked players in the world.”
LIV Golf has suggested that since the OWGR is not reflecting the strength of their players and that the major championships need to consider offering direct spots through LIV’s season-long points list or some sort of compilation of tournaments.
And yet, that seems complicated as representatives from each of the four majors sits on the OWGR board which rejected the bid.
“I think that's up for the majors to decide their fields,” Cantlay said. “The British Open and the U.S. Open are obviously open events, so there's qualifying into those events. The PGA and the Masters are more invitational style. So, it's really up to each individual tournament to determine the criteria to get into those events, and that's not really on my radar.”
