Overcoming The Elite

Following the Kia Classic last month, The Constructivist wondered out loud whether Sandra Gal was the lowest-ranked player in recent years to defeat an elite field.  I've mentioned previously how it is much more likely for a lesser player to win against a weaker field, and this seems like a good time to study the validity of that statement as well as answer TC's question.

I'll use my ranking system (which I've updated after every tournament over the last several years) along with Rolex's to determine where each player was ranked entering the event.  I'll also use my Field Score method to determine the strength of field.  The only question left to resolve is - what level of Field Score constitutes an elite field?  In the three-plus years I've been tracking this, 37 of the 90 events played have registered a Field Score of 90 or higher.  90 seems like a good place to start - we can always bump it a few notches either way later if necessary.

Since the beginning of the 2008 season, 19 of the 90 events played have been won by a player who was not ranked in the Top 40 of both the HD and Rolex Rankings.  If that sounds like a lot, it is - over one event in five has been won by a player outside the Top 40.  TC and I have often said the LPGA is so deep, almost anybody on Tour can win in a given week.  This data seems to back that up.  Here are those 19 winners, along with their prior HD and Rolex rankings and the Field Score of that event:

The asterisks in the HD column mean that ranking was obtained using my old simplified system, which wasn't designed to generate rankings beyond the Top 30 or so.  So while you might use them to presume a player wasn't Top 40 caliber, you shouldn't read any more than that into them.  Five of the winners (bolded) were ranked in the Top 40 of one system or another, though only Eun-Hee Ji was higher than #38 in one.  Other than Ji, I don't feel it's necessary to consider excluding any of these examples because of that.  And before you start on this one, I don't care if Se Ri Pak is a Hall of Famer or not - neither me nor Rolex thought she was among the 37 best players the week before she won Bell Micro and because of that, her win merits inclusion in this list.

Let's answer TC's question before we forget - nope.  M.J. Hur was certainly a lower-ranked player than Sandra Gal when M.J. defeated a great field at the '09 Safeway.  Eunjung Yi probably was too, while Brittany Lincicome and Anna Nordqvist could arguably have been.

Note that eight of the victories came in events with Field Scores of at least 90.  Three others had scores in the 80s (Ji's win at the 08 Wegmans just missed our arbitrary boundary).  To give you a better frame of reference, a score of 90 usually means one Top 10 player sat out that week, plus another in the teens and another one or two between 21 and 40.  That's a pretty tough field, right?  So roughly half of these unexpected victories came in tournaments I would normally label as having a strong field.  But remember what I said back in Paragraph Two - 37 of the 90 events in this study had Field Scores of 90 or better.  If I include the 87s, 88s and 89s to make the average number for this group of elite fields get closer to 90, that total rises to 47 - just over half of all the events.

So if the unexpected wins are split almost evenly across the tough/easy fields and the total events are split almost evenly across the tough/easy fields, that blows away our theory that weaker fields are more likely to produce a surprise winner - doesn't it?  I hate it when I prove myself wrong...

That's a lie.  If this is the truth, better to correct it now than ten years down the road.  It's possible that I'm misinterpreting these results.  It is also possible that this data set is too small to be reliable but unless future results lean more definitively towards the "weak" side, I'll have to stop making this unsupported statement.