A major change is coming to how the NCAA selects college golf teams for postseason competition.
The NCAA’s Competition Oversight Committee updated the men’s and women’s golf postseason selection criteria for 2023-24. The COC approved a recommendation to consider any available longstanding college golf rankings as a resource in preparation for and throughout championship selections.
As noted, the change is made for this year only. The Division I men’s and women’s golf committees received feedback regarding the recent transition to the new college golf ranking system and believe using another established ranking system as a resource will help identify any potential outliers and aid in selecting the most deserving teams and individuals for the championships.
This means instead of just using Mark Broadie’s NCAA college golf rankings, the golf committees can use a ranking like the Golfweek/Sagarin, or if Golfstat was still doing its ranking, to assist in selecting teams for postseason competition.
In a memo sent to women’s golf coaches, Brad Hurlbut, the chair of the Division I Women’s Golf Committee, said the change would “afford the committees the opportunity to consider the impact of each individual event. More specifically, this allowance will give the committees the ability to consider the impact of match play events on the rankings, as we know this is a specific point of concern amongst the membership.”
For more than three decades, the NCAA partnered with Golfstat to provide scoring and rankings for college golf. In July, Spikemark took over the contract, with Broadie put in charge of the rankings while Spikemark would tackle posting those rankings on a website along with scoring, but the site had issues within minutes of the first day of the season. It crashed and never recovered.
On Oct. 16, the NCAA announced Clippd would take over as the official scoring and rankings provider for college golf. Since then, Clippd has provided a working website to host Broadie’s rankings and is prepping to host scoring for the postseason, if the system is fully ready to handle the strenuous load. Most college events this spring remain on other scoring platforms, like Golfstat, Golf Genius and others.
The new college golf rankings are a weighted average points system based on head-to-head stroke differentials. However, it is not a total points-based system. Additional events can help or hurt, with above-average performances helping. Also, shorter events count less than longer events in weighted average. There’s no fixed pod of points players or teams get for finishing first, second, third or fourth. It’s all based on the events and the teams and participating.
At the December college coaches convention in Las Vegas, many coaches weren’t upset with where their teams were placed in the ranking, moreover confused how they got there. Broadie was on hand for numerous seminars and answered questions from coaches for hours on end trying to help those understand the new ranking.
Golfweek spoke with Broadie following one of his breakout sessions, and he made it clear he was willing to adjust his points system based on what coaches wanted and feedback as the season continues.
Those seminars have continued into the spring, but questions around points and how they’re awarded remain. Enough so that coaches wanted the committee to add this change to postseason selection criteria for this spring.
“Please rest assured, the committee will do everything possible to ensure that the best teams and individuals are ultimately selected to participate in the championships,” Hurlbut said in the memo.
The NCAA Division I women’s golf regionals are slated for May 6-8 with the men playing May 13-15. The NCAA Championship moves to Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California, following three years at Grayhawk in Scottsdale, Arizona. The women’s competition is set for May 17-22, and the men play the following week May 24-29.