A New Method for Determining the Fedex Cup Winner

• Activity Number: 417
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Sports
• Author(s): Qinglin Pei*+ and Samuel Wu and Johnny Wu and Huanguang Jia
• Companies: University of Florida and University of Florida and University of Florida and Center of Innovation for Disability and Rehabilitation Research
• Keywords: rank sum method ; PGA Tour ; FedEx cup ; winner determination

Abstract

The current PGA Tour system is divided into the FedEx Cup Season and the FedEx Cup Playoffs. Players earn FedEx Cup points in each event they play. Upon completion of the regular season, all points are summed up and the top 125 point leaders advance to the FedEx Cup Playoff events. Through the first 3 playoff events, each player carries all points earned from the beginning of the FedEx Cup Season. These 3 events feature a progressive cut and determine the final 30 players who qualify for the last event (the Tour Championship). Prior to the final event, points are reset for the players. Then the winner of the FedEx cup is determined by adding up each player's reset points to the points in the final event. Simple as this methodology seems to be, the actual process can be quite confusing for players, media members, golf analysts and fans alike. To make the procedure more intuitive and easier to dynamically update during the tournament, we propose a new system for determination of the FedEx cup winner by only using players' ranks. With each player's strength estimated from the entire 2012 FedEx Cup Season, we compared the current system with the proposed system through simulations.