Titleholders - Not Quite As Good An Idea

In the comments of my Founders Cup post, JNT had a couple of questions about the Titleholders event and pointed out some problems with the qualifying format on which I would like to elaborate.

The Titleholders will field 72 players, three qualifiers from each of the 24 scheduled events leading up to it.  The top three in each event qualify.  Once qualified, a player who finishes in the top three of another tournament will be skipped and the fourth place player there will qualify.  JNT is exactly right in that by the end of the season, nearly all of the players in the Ochoa Invitational will have qualified and there may not be three players left to "represent" that tournament at the Titleholders. 

JNT wondered how ties for second and third would be broken.  Most likely the standard method of matching scorecards would be used - first tiebreak is final round score, second tiebreak is third-round, etc.  I see a need for a secondary method should two players have identical scores each round but that wouldn't have been necessary at any 2010 events.  Taking the results of last year's 24 events (I'll include the Tour Championship to keep the numbers consistent at 24 and 72), here is how the qualifying would have gone (tiebreak losers are in parentheses):

You probably noticed right away that I included non-LPGA members like Hee Kyung Seo and Miki Saiki.  The press release doesn't mention that a player must be an LPGA member to qualify so for now I must assume that those players are eligible.  Given that assumption, there would not have been a problem getting qualifiers from the Ochoa.  I did have to go deep into the twenties to find three of them, however.  In most of the events, the threesome finished in the Top 10 and nearly all qualifiers were in the Top 12 or 14.  Janice Moodie qualified in 15^th place at Arkansas in September, Azahara Munoz (after a couple of lost tiebreakers) made it with T16 in Malaysia and Sophie Gustafson was T18 at Hana Bank.  These were the worst finishers other than the threesome at the Ochoa (T18, T25 and T28).

If you assume that the six non-members do NOT make the Titleholders, here is what difference that would make:

So the Tour needs to clarify whether non-members are eligible or if any spots unfilled by an event are used in some other way.  How about giving any extra spots to the leading player on the money list not already qualified?  Last year, that would have let ML #50 Kyeong Bae into the field.  There's also the other Ochoa question - since Lorena probably would not have played the Titleholders had it been held in 2010, would her reservation be vacated or used like any other "extra" spot?

One of JNT's concerns was that a player who just missed with a fourth-place finish early in the year would get jobbed while a player who finished in the teens late in the year makes it in.  While the latter would certainly have been true in 2010, the former didn't have any glaring examples a year ago.  The best finishes I could find amongst the players who wouldn't have qualified under the non-member scenario was Blumenherst's T7 at Tres Marias and Min's T8 at State Farm.  Candie Kung's T3 at Kia would have been for naught if she hadn't gotten the near-gimme at the Ochoa.  Catriona Matthew and Sophie Gustafson both came up just short early in the year but would have made it with lesser performances late.  All-in-all, it seemed to work out fairly for most.  Which brings me to my final point, which is ....

What IS the point?  Yes I see the attraction of having players qualify each week for this season-ending event and the interest it might generate.  The idea of showcasing all of the season's events and their sponsors at the final tournament is a nice touch.  But when it appears that the resulting field is going to be the money list Top 45 plus an assortment of others who may or may not have finished in the Top 5 sometime during the year, it winds up being much ado about little.  And JNT is right about one other thing - the name "Titleholders" becomes a real misnomer when players like Sophia Sheridan qualify simply because they were a special invitee to a late-season event.  I'm a whole lot more impressed by the Founders Cup idea than I am about the Titleholders.