Not just any Old Tom, Dick or Harry has made our collection of Top 100 Golf Course Architects. Instead, if you thought Old Tom Morris, Dick Wilson and Harry Colt might make an appearance then you won't be disappointed as they all make the cut.

When comparing Donald Ross and Perry Maxwell, Tom Doak was very clear: “Saying one was better than the other seems pointless to me. Both were great talents, and I’ve always said I prefer to rate courses, not architects.”

However, we’ve been ranking and rating golf courses now for more than fifteen years and by doing so we subconsciously evaluate the architecture involved and therefore the architect or architects who fashioned each course.

We’re passionate about rating golf courses, so we decided to do the unthinkable – something that’s never been done before – and define a scoring system such that we could reasonably identify the Top 100 Architects.

We have enough golf courses rating data to sink a small battleship. All we had to do was to add up the points and at first we thought the task would be relatively simple. But, as always, the devil was in the detail.

For instance, Pete Dye designed the Teeth of the Dog course at Casa de Campo; so allocating those points was easy. However, we found it trickier to work out how to allocate the architectural points for collaborations and for courses that have been altered down the years through restoration, renovation or extending an old nine-hole course to eighteen holes.

We decided that we’d allocate most points to the original architect or architects and fewer points to restoration architects and fewer points still to renovation architects. Some course renovations have been “re-renovated” by undoing the original renovation work, which may have been poorly implemented. In these instances we didn’t award any points to the original renovation architect.

It’s not exactly rocket science, but what we were able to do was to identify the world’s best architects by awarding the most points for courses ranked in the World Top 100 and fewer points for courses ranked in our other tiers of continental, national and regional ranking tables.

We’ve stopped short of actually ranking the architects, as we felt that might be a step too far. But we’ve loosely sequenced the order in which the architects appear within our ten paginated pages of ten architects.

We’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not we’ve arranged these undoubtedly talented designers in the right order, or whether we’ve included – or not included – the right architects. Click to read the full story: Top 100 Golf Course Architects