A new way of evaluating disc golf performance over a longer time frame.

October 4, 2022 by Aaron Howard, Charlie Eisenhood and Patrick Aubyrn in Analysis with comments

As part of our coverage leading up to the United States Disc Golf Championships, Throw Pink Women’s Disc Golf Championship, and DGPT Championships, Ultiworld Disc Golf is debuting our own World Rankings. These world rankings are based on the methods used for the algorithmic component of our Power Rankings. However, unlike the Power Ranking, which follow a “what have you done for me lately?” philosophy with a heavy bias towards recent results, the UWDG World Rankings are more holistic: they attempt to capture a long-term view of who has been the best player over the last two years.

Without further ado, here are the UWDG World Rankings top 25 for both MPO and FPO:

We’ve worked on fine tuning our World Rankings model for some time (more details below) and are excited to finally share them. However, we fully admit that our rankings are only one of many that are now available, and, in fact, the best rankings are most likely a combination of the most popular world rankings available. So, we took some inspiration from Nate Silver’s 538 and developed a composite world ranking that combines our rankings along with those produced by the PDGA, UDisc, and Statmando into a single combined ranking set.

Your gut reaction to this composite ranking might be one of concern: Is it meaningful to combine all of these seemingly disparate ranking systems? The answer is yes! The fact that all of these systems use slightly different methods to rank players means that a composite ranking will capture all of these different aspects of player performance and produce a potentially better ranking. It is the concept of “wisdom of the crowd” in action.

Here is the first edition of the Composite World Disc Golf Rankings for both MPO and FPO:

Methods

We built our world ranking system from the objective algorithm used as a part of our power rankings. We started by standardizing the round scores from all Elite Series and Major events from the 2020, 2021, and 2022 seasons, then weighted them by payout and strength of field. A better (lower) score gets a higher standardized score and events with higher payouts and stronger fields get more weight.

The better you score, the more you win. To more accurately…