Comparing the RBC and LIV Centurion Fields

The LIV Golf Tour picked a good week for its debut.

When the new Tour tees it up for the first time later this week at Centurion Club near London, it will be competing for the golfing public’s attention with one of the weaker fields on the PGA Tour.

In several respects, the depth and quality of the LIV Tour field will be competitive with the PGA Tour’s event.

Part of the reason is that so many of the mainstay PGA Tour stars are sitting out this week’s RBC Canadian Open in order to prepare for next week’s US Open at Brookline.

The result is, by comparison with most weeks, a lightweight RBC Canadian Open field.

Only eight of the world’s 25 top-ranked players, and only 12 of the top 50, are teeing it up at St. George’s in Toronto.

The fact that five of those dozen top 50 players rank among the games’ top 10 does give the RBC Canadian an edge over the LIV event in star-power. The RBC field includes world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler as well as Cameron Smith (3), Justin Thomas (5), Rory Mcilroy (8), and Sam Burns (9).

The highest-ranked player in the LIV event is Dustin Johnson (13). The only other LIV commit from the world’s top 20 is Louis Oosthuizen (20). Only Kevin Na (33) and Talor Gooch (35) rank among the top 50.

The inaugural LIV event has the strength of field to match the RBC Canadian Opens’.

But once past the star names, the quality of the LIV field stacks up surprisingly well against the RBC Canadian Open, which has fleshed out its thin 151-player field with a heavy helping of lesser-knowns.

Twenty-nine of the 42 current commits at Centurion rank among the world’s top 200 players. That’s fewer than the 49 top 200 reps who will be in Toronto.

But it represents nearly 70 percent of the LIV field announced to date, compared with just 32 percent of the  RBC field.

The average world ranking of a commit to the LIV opener is 302.9. That may not sound very high, but it’s more than 100 places higher than the rank of the average commit to the RBC, which is 420.5.

The median world rank of players in the LIV event is 119th; at the RBC the comparable figure is 296.5.

That’s in part due to the fact that, lacking so many big names, the RBC has had to fill out its field with players not normally seen in a regular PGA Tour event. No fewer than 25 players ranked outside the top 1,000 will make a start in Toronto. That’s nearly one in every five starters.

The LIV event will feature just five players outside the game’s top 1,000…and in the smaller field that only represents 12 percent of the announced field to date.