A new way of evaluating players.

March 15, 2022 by Karl Lamothe in Analysis, Rankings with comments

StatMando, an online disc golf statistics platform, has been busy digging deep into the sport’s stats for over a year. In that time, the team has devoted countless hours to developing a platform for accessing player statistics and is now happy to present a new, unique ranking system for player comparisons in both MPO and FPO.

Why do we need a new player ranking system?

The StatMando Official Rankings emphasize two important features:

1. The strength of the field; and,
2. The difficulty of getting the win.

Each disc golf tournament has a unique line-up of competitors with different abilities. This is true for your local C-tier event and true for Elite Series events at the highest level of the sport. Some events will attract the best disc golfers in the world, whereas others may have more limited fields. At StatMando, we feel that this is an important consideration when evaluating the outcome of a tournament, and subsequently, how players are ranked.

And never in the history of disc golf has it been more challenging to get the win then it is today! There were over 75 MPO players with a 1000+ rating and over 25 FPO players with a 920+ rating that competed in the 2022 Las Vegas Challenge alone. Given the trend over the last 20 years, we can only expect that these numbers will continue to grow. For example, the average player rating of competitors in Elite Series events¹ has increased 19.48 points in MPO and 35.27 points in FPO since 2003. The increasingly competitive nature of disc golf tournaments is making it more difficult to win, and as a result, getting the win at tournaments with deeper fields should be rewarded in player…