Maybe their definition of “ranking” is “A player (or list of players) that performs better more consistently within a predetermined time frame.”? That would put Safina pretty easily above Serena wouldn’t it?
In an ideal world this would happen, except for Aussies climbing around in the crowd, of course.
Trouble is, the broadcasters who gave us such a gripping match don’t want people switching off between the end of that match and the subsequent interviews. However, I can’t think of any other major sport where this situation applies.
I’d exclude team games because if, for example, you lose the World Cup final to a dodgy penalty deep into stoppage time at least there are other shoulders to cry on. It’s a collective defeat. In golf, there can be no victor until the accuracy of the scorecard has been verified so you won’t find immediate post-game interviews with winners and losers in that sport. In major tennis finals the defeated player is on his own. The coach can’t trespass onto the court to commiserate or advise, neither can the spouse. It must have been lonely out there for Roddick, speaking of whom he now has a new number one fan, namely myself.
She was totally shit as an interviewer. Good riddance.
I never thought the rankings were supposed to have any kind of predictive value. That’d be a fools’ errand anyway since seedings don’t account for the matchups between players. I think the rankings are supposed to reflect performance. The only titles Serena has won over the last year or so are the three majors. That’s a great result, but it’s also really unusual. If she were performing well at other events - she wouldn’t even have to be doing as well as Safina - she’d be ahead. Who ever heard of winning nothing except major events for this long a period?
I’m not sure what you mean. Safina was the number one seed at Wimbledon, then Serena, then Venus, the two-time defending champion. The seeds generally reflected the rankings with the exception of Sharapova.
The women are just almost always seeded according to their rankings. The men have a different seeding formula, which reflects grass court events going further back. Here’s an explanation/complaint about how it works.
What drives her nuts is that she isn’t getting what she wants. 
She’ll pull ahead if she plays more consistently at other big tournaments.
You know, you didn’t respond to the main point I was making. A “ranking” is supposed to be predictive. There is no other purpose to “ranking” people. Everyone here gets that, except you, apparently. 
I don’t think a ranking is supposed to be predictive, it is a reflection of results. Admittedly, they usually go hand and hand.
As I said earlier, I think the ranking process is an attempt to have an objective measurement system for a subjective rating.
Just because the numbers don;t come out the way people think it should at a certain point in time, does not mean the system should be changed capriciously.
Seedings are supposed to be predictive. Rankings are supposed to reflect what has already happened.
This. Eloquently summed.
The problem comes when you then seed based (purely) on rankings. See the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Committee for an example on how to get a good result by adding in other factors.
I didn’t say the seeding system was any good, just that that’s what it’s for.
The French Open organizers do by far the best job of seeding based on actual likelihood of success - and of course their seedings will always be significantly different from the rankings because the seedings are weighted towards fast-court specialists.
That idea makes sense. It’s not how things are done right now, though. The tournaments really don’t re-seed, they just repeat the rankings. There’s been a pattern lately of the seeding at tournaments not reflecting reality, for different reasons: Nadal wasn’t the top seed at the French Open until this year because he wasn’t number one in the world (because Federer edged ahead of him on other surfaces), and Serena hasn’t been the top seed at anything because of her inconsistent non-slam performance, even though she’s definitely the best player in the big events.
What are you talking about? The French Open seeds according to the ATP 52-week world rankings. So does the Australian Open and the U.S. Open. Wimbledon is the only one of the major tournaments that does not seed according to those rankings. Federer was the number one seed there in 2006, 2007 and 2008 even though Nadal was the defending champion and definitely the best player in the world on clay.
Here is an ESPN column that applies the Wimbledon formula to the French seedings.
Has the French Open changed their philosophy? I thought they always went by the rankings for their seedings? I think John McEnroe recently said that he begged the French Open organizers not to seed him number 1 back in his prime. He did not want the “pressure” of being the number one seed.
Are you sure? I distinctly remember Sergei Brugeira and Thomas Muster having the first seed in the mid-90s although neither was World #1 at the time.
Yes, I’m sure. Muster was briefly number one in the world in early 1996, but his highest French Open seeing was #2, since he’d lost the top spot by then. He won the tournament in 1995 as the fifth seed. Bruguera won the French Open in 1993 (#10) and 1994 (#6). He made the final in 1997 (#16) and lost to Gustavo Kuerten. Kuerten won the title there three times, including as the top seed in 2001.
How was Kuerten the top seed if the seedings always follow the world rankings?
What interesting is that seedings do not account for “trends”. A player might have very poor results for the last 3 or 4 months. But great results from the last part of 2008 have artificially elevated the player’s ranking.
If tennis rankings are like golf rankings, there is a spoilage effect, recent results are counted more heavily than results from 9 months ago. But a player might have a confidence problem and be trending to a #20 ranking when in fact (s)he is ranked in the top 8.
He was number one in the world at the time. He was number one three different times: December 2000/January 2001, February to early April 2001, and late April to November 2001. The French Open is in late May to early June.
I heard about Montcourt’s death yesterday morning. That’s really too bad.
Minor piece of information for the rankings debate: the WTA rankings are based on the player’s best 16 results over the last 52 weeks. So you can’t just get ahead by playing more tournaments. What happens is that if you play more than 16 tournaments, your worst results get dropped. Safina had played 19 events, so her three worst results (whatever those happened to be) were not figured into her ranking. Serena played 17 tournaments, so only one result got dropped. So only one bad result got left out. So most of her four-match losing streak is included. If she’d played two more events and done okay, for example, two more of those losses would be left out.
It should be noted that certain tournament results MUST be included in those rankings. So you don’t get to drop all bad results.
It should also be noted that the rankings did not change for any of the top ten participants, despite the results at Wimbledon. So Serena holds 3 of 4 majors, and Safina hasn’t won one yet, and Safina is ranked higher.
Now, I’ll retract part of my earlier comment. I guess that there are fewer who agree with me than I thought. :eek: That’s ok, I’ll go it alone. 
If all the “WTA Tour Singles Rankings” were intended to do was give you a snapshot of how a player has done on the WTA tour the previous 12 months, then no one could complain about them. Much. I suppose you could quibble about the relative value of winning a major versus winning a lesser tournament, but that sort of debate always exists; it’s a subjective evaluation.
But these rankings do more. They are intended to serve as a method of determining seeding in a tournament, as well as eligibility for tournaments. In this intent, they become more than an attempt to define how well someone has played over the last year of the Tour. They act as a proxy for other more subjective measures of player ability. As a result, if they are not predictive, then they are not doing their job.
And they are clearly not predictive. By the rankings, Dinara Safina is entitled to the #1 seed in all WTA tournaments, and any tournament that uses the rankings to seed (such as The Championships - Wimbledon). But she’s not WINNING the ones that are important, where everyone shows up. She has had 5 wins in the last year, but they were all minor tournaments. She’s only beaten each of the Williams sisters once, both times on clay in lead-in tournaments to the French Open. In the last slightly over one year, she’s 3 - 3 against Dementieva, but two of those wins were 2008 clay tournaments (more than a year ago), and a single grass win at a minor Wimbledon lead-in; meanwhile Dementieva has beaten her at the Olympics, the Tour Championship and the Australian Open. You have to get down to Svetlana Kuznetsova before you find someone that she’s regularly beating (5 - 2 in the last year +).
Conclusion? She should be ranked about #4, slightly behind Dementieva, definitely ahead of Kuznetsova, and not even CLOSE to either Williams sister. And she shouldn’t be able to get ahead of the Williams sisters until she demonstrates that she can beat them at least as often as they can beat her, and do so in tournaments that MATTER.
Until then, continuing to “rank” her as being better than those women is simply wrong. And that’s what causes Serena to roll her eyes when people ask about it.
I think the other major events should do what Wimbledon does and make past performance a larger part of the seeding. The rankings and seedings don’t need to be identical, and in fact it’s rather ridiculous for anybody other than Venus and Serena to be the top two seeds at Wimbledon, since they’ve won there eight of the last 10years.
They were not minor tournaments at all. Basically, all five of them were in the most important group of tournaments excluding the majors. There are divisions and subdivisions explained here, but they’re important events. I think the most important of them - the mandatory events - are worth half as many points as one of the major tournaments. Safina is #1 because she’s won five of these over the last year and gone very deep in the slams, while Serena has won three majors but not done particularly well at these tournaments. (She made one final and that’s it.) “Minor” tournaments would be the international events.
The majors are the most important tournaments for sure. If you think everything other tournament is “minor,” of course these rankings won’t make sense. What really doesn’t make sense is that Serena has been winning slams and doing very little - often bombing - everyplace else. You’d expect her to be doing, more or less, what Safina is doing: consistently making deep runs almost everyplace she plays. Instead, she’s bringing her A game to the biggest tournaments and not doing much at any other event.