OWGR Points: PGA Tour Edging Away From European Tour

Doug Ferguson filed two notes on the all-important Official World Golf Rankings from 2013. First, there was the statistical evidence back Tiger's assertion that while he does not play a lot, he plays against stacked fields even if some of them are of the limited-variety.

Woods earned 488.75 points this year, only 3.65 points ahead of Stenson. Adam Scott was third, more than 100 points behind.

The difference, however, is that Woods played only 19 tournaments that awarded world ranking points. Stenson played 31 tournaments. Woods earned an average of 25.7 points for every tournament he played, compared with 15.6 points for Stenson.

And here is the bad news for the European Tour, as players place more importance on ranking points in deciding where they play. Ferguson says that the top 28 players in the world ranking at the end of 2012 were PGA Tour members this year and that outside of the BMW PGA at Wentworth, the majors and PGA Tour events led the way in points offered.

The average reward for PGA Tour winners was 56.2 ranking points, compared with 43 points on the European Tour. That includes the majors and World Golf Championships for both tours. Remove those eight big events, and the average was 47.3 points for PGA Tour winners compared with 33.1 points on the European Tour.

Except for the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, which gets a bonus as the flagship event, the strongest field on the European Tour was in Abu Dhabi (54 points). The PGA Tour had nine events with a stronger field. The Barclays and Deutsche Bank Championship led the way, offering 74 points each. That's to be expected because they start off the FedEx Cup playoffs. Of regular events, the Memorial gave 70 points to the winner.