Rory McIlroy is an important voice in the professional golf landscape, but it unsurprisingly doesn’t move the needle for Lee Westwood.
Westwood hits back at Rory
The 52-year-old LIV Golf member went on talkSport’s Breakfast Show on Thursday to discuss LIV Golf’s move to 72 holes and respond to McIlroy’s comments over the league’s decision, noting the five-time major champion has flip-flopped quite a bit over the past few years since LIV’s arrival.
“I don’t know. I don’t pay too much attention to what Rory says, really,” Westwood said. “He’ll change his mind next week.”
Rory’s thoughts on LIV’s move
On Wednesday, McIlroy discussed LIV Golf’s stunning decision to move all competitions from 54 holes to 72 holes in an effort to remove a hurdle for entrance into the Official World Golf Ranking. The five-time major champion was left with more questions than answers about how the move would boost the breakaway league’s standing in the ecosystem.
“I think it’s a peculiar move because I think they could have got ranking points with three rounds,” McIlroy said ahead of the 2025 Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. “I don’t think three rounds versus four rounds is what was holding them back. It certainly puts them more in line with traditional golf tournaments than what we’ve all done. It brings them back into not really being a disruptor and sort of falling more in line with what everyone else does.”
The move to 72 holes, combined with LIV’s decision to open up more pathways into the league, could lead to the league gaining entry into the OWGR, which would provide its players with the points needed to qualify for major championships. But McIlroy isn’t sure how much the OWGR points will help LIV players now, given how far they have already fallen in the rankings.
“I think what’s hard is you’ve got the LIV guys, and say potentially they get World Rankings, but because their strength of fields are going to be so weak because a lot of the guys have fallen already in the rankings because they have not had ranking points for so long,” McIlroy said. “I don’t know if the ranking points are really going to benefit them. Yeah, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.”
While McIlroy is correct that most of LIV’s players have plummeted in the OWGR — only three players are currently in the top 50 — a change to the OWGR algorithm could help the Saudi-backed league. In 2022, the OWGR created a metric called “Strokes Gained World Rating,” which factors in not just where you finish on the leaderboard but the scores you shoot relative to the field you play in. So, for example, while Jon Rahm is currently the 71st-ranked golfer in the OWGR, he is fifth in “Strokes Gained World Rating.” That change could help LIV Golf’s limited fields gain more OWGR points than they would have when the strength of field was based solely on the ranking of the players in the tournament.
Our Sean Zak has a detailed explainer of the metric from when the OWGR introduced it here.
LIV’s motivation for rules change
LIV Golf’s decision to change was welcomed by many of its top players, including Bryson DeChambeau.
While OWGR entry was a reason for the move, Westwood noted it wasn’t the only one, and it might not have even been the main justification for the shift.
“I think [OWGR points] is one of the angles behind it. I think there were a few different things,” Westwood said. “Some of the guys focused their whole season around the major championships. And playing 54 holes was putting them at a bit of a disadvantage. I think they wanted to play 72 holes — that represented more the major championship format. But world rankings is one of the things on LIV’s mind. I don’t know whether it’s in the criteria or not because there’s 54-hole tournaments that got world ranking points before. But I think the boxes that you need to tick with the world rankings, 72 holes probably helps that.”
Tyrrell Hatton, who is one of the three LIV players inside the top 50 of the OWGR, said on Wednesday that most of LIV’s players had previously voted against moving tournaments from 54 to 72 holes. But that shifted this year.
“I think it’s a good thing that LIV have moved to four rounds,” Hatton said in Abu Dhabi. “I know at the end of my first season, there was a questionnaire that was filled out. One of the questions was about moving to 72 holes. I think of everyone who filled it out, I think there was only three guys, initially, who had said [yes] about moving there [to 72 holes]. I guess that’s changed quite a bit in the last year, and certainly from my standpoint, I’m quite happy that we’ve moved to 72 holes.”
Time will tell if the move has the desired effect for Hatton, Westwood and the breakaway league.