Player of the Year Scenarios
by hound dog on Nov 17, 2010 3:00 PM PST
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PrintFive players are still in the running for the Rolex Player of the Year Award with only one event remaining, the LPGA Tour Championship. We had three players in the hunt at this time last year which was complicated enough. Once again, I'll do my best to spell out the possibilities.
Let's start with the points distribution. Points are awarded for finishing in the Top 10 - 30 for the winner, 12 for second place, 9 for third, 7 for fourth and one point less for each position on down to one point for tenth place. If multiple players finish tied for a position, they each get the entire point total. For example - if four players were tied for fourth, each would get seven points. As a reminder, here is how the five players stand at the moment:
|
Yani Tseng Ai Miyazato Na Yeon Choi Cristie Kerr Jiyai Shin |
188 179 174 173 170 |
In listing out what each player must do to win the award, I'll start at the bottom. Since I do not know of any tiebreakers that will be used, these scenarios concentrate on what a player needs to do to be sure of winning it outright.
Jiyai Shin
Must win the Tour Championship while Tseng does not finish second.
Cristie Kerr
Must win the Tour Championship.
Na Yeon Choi
Must win the Tour Championship.
Ai Miyazato
1. Win the Tour Championship, or
2. Finish second while Tseng finishes no better than ninth and none of the other three wins
Yani Tseng
1. Win the Tour Championship, or
2. Finish second through seventh while none of the other four wins, or
3. Finish eighth, ninth or tenth while Miyazato finishes no better than third and none of the other three wins, or
4. Finish outside the Top 10 while Miyazato finishes no better than fourth and none of the other three wins
So it's actually a lot more straightforward than I expected. Tseng has just the right size lead to keep the point margins between second and tenth from affecting very much. Now for the potential nightmare - the ties. While there are lots of combinations that would create ties for other positions, these are the only three that would tie for first:
1. Shin wins and Tseng finishes second - tied at 200 points
2. Miyazato finishes second, Tseng finishes eighth and none of the other three win - tied at 191
3. Miyazato finishes third, Tseng finishes out of the Top 10 and none of the other three win - tied at 188
So how should any of these ties be settled? If you insist on having only one Player of the Year (as I personally would prefer), I think the first tiebreaker ought to be victories with the second being the money list. Using that plan, Tie #1 above would get broken on the second tiebreaker since both players would have three 2010 victories and Shin would be the winner because she would have earned more money. Ties #2 and 3 would go to Miyazato five victories to three.
If this tiebreaker plan doesn't suit your taste, we could always use the HD Player Rating System to sort things out...
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Not the only thing at stake here.
Thanks for the breakdown. I’m sure it clears up plenty of questions. I just want to point out that there is alot more riding on the last lpga event than just player of the year.
- - The Vare trophy (which like player of the year) carries a hall of fame point with it. Currently Na Yeon Choi leads at 69.77 but other players can steal that very important HOF point. Cristie Kerr (who currently has 16 of the 27 points needed to be a hall of famer) is at 69.86. Petterson is at 69.92 and Shin is at 69.95. All of them can win it.
- - The money race between Choi and Shin (nobody else can win) is up for grabs.
- - There are several players fighting for there lives to make the top 80 and top 100 on the money list ( see Pernilla Lindberg) and assure themselves a priority rating that will assure them of getting playing time next year. I am hoping that you will better explain this yourself in the next 10 days or so.
one thing at a time
I have plans to detail both the money list races and the Vare race in the coming days.
Vare
And, tony5, as Hound Dog has pointed out a week or so back, Jiyai and Suzann can’t win the Vare Trophy as they won’t have played 70 rounds (so they could top the scoring average ranking but not win the Vare).
Shin actually has the best scoring average on the JLPGA tour too, but can’t win their equivalent either because she’s only played 7 events there.
And great post HD
Your post lays it out very clearly (I bet it’s clearer than what goes up on the LPGA site), but if all 5 of them are near the top of the leaderboard on Sunday it’ll get very tense very quickly.
Tie Breaking
It seems to me that tie 1 would be broken on the first tie breaker with Tseng winning over Shin 5 to 3 with Majors counting double.
70 rounds to qualify for Vare
I think the 70 round rule should be reduced. It was fine when they were playing 32 tourmaments but now with only 24 official tournaments this year it has gotten increasly difficult to hit that number if you want to to a few weeks off or you miss a few weeks because of a bad back.
Petterson when she play in Orlando will have played in 19 of the 24 tournaments. SHE HAS NOT MISSED A CUT. But because 6 of those tournys were just 3 rounds and Sybase (she got eliminated after 1 round) counted as just 1 round she will come up just short.
Re: 70 rounds to qualify for vare
Quite – as HD’s post on this shows, he and I agree. That said, on reflection, I’ve kind of come round to the view that maybe it’s not that simple. Jiyai (full disclosure: my favourite player by far, and someone who I think has the potential to achieve Annikaesque levels of dominance) could, actually, have played the requisite rounds. She played the CyberAgent Ladies on the JLPGA instead of Tres Marias, the Fujitsu Ladies on the JLPGA instead of CVS, and the HiMart Ladies Open on the KLPGA (in fairness, this was played basically in her hometown) instead of Navistar. Assuming that she made every cut (a fair assumption in my view), she would actually only have needed to play two of those along with the Tour Championship to qualify. She missed State Farm and ShopRite because of her surgery (playing them could have left her on 69 rounds as ShopRite was 54 holes!), but skipped Lorena’s tournament voluntarily, and she also played a further 4 JLPGA tournaments (Daikin Orchid, Nishijin Ladies, Fujisankei Ladies and Miyagi TV Cup Dunlop) plus the KLPGA Championship on LPGA off-weeks, so she’s still had a very busy year, having played a total of 25 tournaments so far, with two missed because of her surgery. If you were the LPGA, wouldn’t you take the view that, if a player is going to play 25 tournaments, the rules should encourage her to play those 25 weeks on the LPGA Tour?
Or, to put it another way, in a year with 30 tournaments, I (imagine I’m an LPGA pro, go on!) play 26 tournaments. If the following year only has 27 tournaments, why does it follow that I reduce my schedule to 24 tournaments instead of again playing 26? The top flight don’t get bumped out of fields like the low-status players. This is particularly difficult to argue against if I cut my LPGA schedule to, say, 20 starts but play, say, 10 times in Asia (including opposite some LPGA tournaments).
I bow to no one in my admiration of Jiyai (except possibly for some of the SeoulSisters.com crowd) but Suzann, Yani, and Jiyai could have played 70 rounds – NYC has already clocked up 75. They chose not to do so, so the rules are the rules. As HD and I agreed, if the total rounds fell to or (even funnier) below 70 rounds, the rule becomes stupid.
From my reading of lots of Jiyai’s interviews, she rightly places her health, and her long-term ability to win, ahead of immediate goals – she has plenty of time to get into the Hall of Fame (at the same age, Cristie was, what, about two years away from her first LPGA win? (Longs Drugs Challenge 2002)), so I doubt she is overly concerned about the minimum rounds rule at this point. I just hope that next year she has no health issues and can dominate the way she did the KLPGA.
very valid points
If Kerr, Choi and Song-Hee Kim can clear 70, obviously the other top-flight players can. Of course injuries kept Shin and Pettersen out of a couple of events (just enough to leave them short, unfortunately) but chosing to play elsewhere when the LPGA is active is all on Jiyai’s hands.
Another part of this problem is that while the Tour’s schedule had many off-weeks, they still had a five-week stretch of events in June/July and a six-week stretch in October/November. The top players rarely play more than four straight weeks so those stretches force another absence. There are mitigating circumstances to burn here, but the bottom line is that the Tour’s 2010 schedule (the low number of events and the arrangement of the dates) made it more difficult than usual to amass 70 rounds. Both Jiyai Shin and Suzann Pettersen played often enough that they should be qualified for the Vare Trophy.
Tie Breaking. Settle it on the course and not the boardroom.
I’m supprised the LPGA haven’t announced the tie breakers on their website. Obviously, you use whatever tiebreakers are already in place. If they don’t have tiebreakers already in place I don’t think you go back to the same set of results that have already occurred. Whichever methodology chosen would favor one golfer over another. Tseng has already earned double points for her two majors. That’s 120 of her 188 points. And Shin has already gotten her points for her victories and 10 other top 5 finishes. Don’t settle it in the boardroom or committeeroom. The fairest way is to settle it on the course in an event that hasn’t been played yet.. If you want the LPGA Tour Championship to mean more than a regular tournament then make their final results the tie breaker. That would give credance to the name LPGA Tour Championship. If that’s not already on the books, start it next year. Shin needs the points from the event to win or tie for POY. Using that this year would appear to skew the criteria in Shin’s favor. I would want to settle it on the course using either the final round results (the low score for the last round doesn’t imply tournament champion) or a 3 hole (par 3, 4, and 5) playoff while the fans and TV coverage is still there. It would be a fair and dramatic ending to the Championship.
not a bad idea
But like all tiebreakers, it needs to be in place prior to the season (or far enough in advance to give every player equal opportunity to account for it). It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to find out in the next two weeks that there IS a tiebreaker already in place but the word hasn’t been spread.
RE: not a bad idea
You have more faith in the LPGA than I do, Hound Dog! Given the priority list screw-ups you’ve detailed before, who knows what will happen if one of the tie scenarios comes up?!
Faith?
I didn’t say I expected it, just that it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve stopped counting the times that I have laid out the scenarios for some LPGA honor or qualifying, only to find out after the fact about an unposted rule which made my conclusions incorrect.
Agreed
If they are not already using the results of the LPGA Tour Championship as the tie breaker they should put it on the books starting next year. That’s why I have the two different tiebreakers. If using the LPGA Tour Championship results as a tiebreaker is not already in place it would not be fair to start using it this year because for Ji Yai Shin to be a part of the tiebreaker she would have to win the tournament. Then she would win the tiebreaker by default. That’s why I also included the tiebreaking option of using the final round score or a three hole playoff (par 3, 4, and 5). That way the winner is decided on the course and not in a committee.
by sports medic on Nov 19, 2010 9:42 AM PST up reply actions
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