Elling: New World Order - New World Order: Watney turns up wattage, Martins attack Top 10

Time flies like a Gary Woodland drive. With the same approximate ball speed, too.
The first major championship of 2011 is nine days away. We're already three months and 14 events into the PGA Tour season. The European Tour is back to staging events that nobody cares about, including all the top players.
The Desert, West Coast and Florida Swings have rolled past and spring break has broken. So in terms of measurement or evaluative periods, that's not just a decent sample size, but enough for a second heaping helping.
Listed below is our monthly, single-minded version of the Associated Press college basketball poll, where strength of schedule, W's and L's and recent performance are tossed into a hat along with the Official World Golf Ranking and Sagarin numbers, then spat out like the RPI for hoops.
In other words, there's both sanity and subjectivity involved, not to mention a lot more movement than in the OWGR and Sagarins, which are often incredibly slow to adjust to recent developments. (Sagarin has Martin Laird buried at No. 43?)
When our New World Order ranking was concocted in the offseason by the boss, the idea was to provide a world top-10 list that reflected actual firepower and intuitive sense, resulting in a dominance index that is ultimately more reflective of two things.
The here and now.
Note that for those who thought the only current trends in the professional game related to European dominance and the emergence of several promising younger players, there are two foreign dudes named Martin in the newest CBSSports.com top 10. We're all about the trend-spotting. Speaking of which, has anybody seen Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Steve Stricker, Anthony Kim or Jim Furyk in contention lately?
The latest batch of rankings, a mix of math and personal impressions gleaned over five weeks on the road at consecutive PGA Tour events, are unusually fluid. We're not saying that to make fun of the three balls Woods dunked in the water at Bay Hill last week, either. Not necessarily.
The OWGR's top 10, by the way, has remained completely unchanged for the past three weeks. That surely isn't the case here.
1. Martin Kaymer. OWGR: 1. Sagarin: 9. Previous NWO rank: 1
I'd say the Germans are taking over the world, but that would make several countries in Europe start looking over their shoulders. The Germanics are all over the golf news lately. Last weekend, two-time Masters champ Bernhard Langer, the best player on the Champions Tour, had surgery on a thumb. On Sunday, Sandra Gal won for the first time on the LPGA. If you haven't seen her, and you consider yourself a blue-blooded member of the male gender, then make the time. What does all this have to do with Kaymer, the Dusseldorf Destroyer? Absolutely nothing. But he didn't play all that impressively over the past month. Somebody has to top this chart.
2. Luke Donald. OWGR: 3. Sagarin: 6. Previous NWO rank: 7
Is seems like he cooled off some since winning the Accenture Match play four weeks ago, but that's not exactly true. In fact, he's been firing up his Twitter account and proving to those who believed him to be something of a vanilla guy to be more akin to Neapolitan. His play has been solid, too. He played twice in Florida, finishing T-10 and T6, the latter at the WGC event at Doral. If Donald isn't on your screen for Augusta, then you must not be paying attention.
3. Nick Watney. OWGR: 14. Sagarin: 3. Previous NWO rank: NR
From unranked to No. 3 on the New World Order list might seem like a reach, but not given the way the polite Californian has played this year. In fact, he compiled a streak of five straight top 10s to open the season, including a win at Doral, before hitting rock bottom two weeks ago in Tampa. By rock bottom, that means he finished an appalling T13. While Watney has largely been under the radar of most fans, he surely has been noticed by the bookmakers, who have installed him as No. 3 co-favorite at the Masters behind Woods and Lefty. With their electricity bills, those Vegas Strip guys know what they're doing. Generally, so do we. Watney is the new hot-button pick as best Yank in the game.
4. Graeme McDowell. OWGR: 4. Sagarin: 5. Previous NWO rank: 2
The alarm bells are sounding at the moment for G-Mac and he'd be the first to admit it. He shot 80 in the first round at Bay Hill as the top-ranked player in the field and missed the cut, capping a month of unsatisfactory play. McDowell has a Masters scouting trip set for Tuesday, then will hunker down the rest of this week with his coach, Pete Cowen, for some serious swing massaging before Augusta. McDowell, as hot as any player in the world heading into the spring, has been grinding hard on his game for a month with little to show for it. He's got a week to find and fix his technical issue.
5. Matt Kuchar. OWGR: 9. Sagarin: 2. Previous rank: 6
While Watney was winning at Doral three weeks ago, Kuchar was cruising along, as ever, finishing a solid fifth. Professional to the hilt, Kooch then spent several minutes politely explaining to reporters afterward that he isn't upset that he hasn't won more often during his heady two-year run, which has included an array of top-10 finishes and the 2010 PGA Tour money title. Surprisingly, Kuchar has been repeatedly tinkering with the length of his putter for weeks, though he might be the best pure putter on this list. As much as he has been in contention, it's not hard to envision a couple of wins before season's end.
6. Lee Westwood. OWGR: 2. Sagarin: 1. Previous NWO rank: 3
He's easily off to the slowest start of anybody on this list, but the former world No. 1 hasn't exactly fainted since climbing the mountain to the top slot last fall. He's made six starts in 2011 on several different types of tracks, and has finished 18th or better in three of them. Westwood famously was felled by some Mickelson magic last year at the Masters, and perhaps he's saving his best for April. Let's hope so, or he won't make the cut on this list in May.
7. Bubba Watson. OWGR: 17. Sagarin: 24. Previous NWO rank: 4
It was a disappointing finish for Watson at Bay Hill, where he entered the final day four shots behind two players who had one career victory between them. Watson, on the other hand, has two wins in the past nine months, plus a runner-up finish to Kaymer at the last major. Watson looks as though he has some Mickelson in him, meaning mercurial performances have become a pattern. He shot 78 on Sunday, including a 40 on the back nine. In three starts since winning at Torrey Pines, he has finished T29, T28 and T24.
8. Paul Casey. OWGR: 7. Sagarin: 13. Previous NWO rank: 10
If you think Watson's past few weeks have been schitzo, Casey has been even more unpredictable. He led at Tampa after one round, then lost the plot and faded to T37 with a sloppy weekend. In a move that drew some second-guessing, he declined to play this week at Houston -- where he won his lone PGA Tour title in 2009 -- in order to stay home and work on his game before heading next week to Augusta, where he has only once seriously contended. Since winning on the European Tour earlier this year, Casey has three fairly solid top-18 finishes, plus a missed cut in addition to the Tampa fadeaway. Like with McDowell, it'll be interesting to track the shape of his game when he shows up next week on Magnolia Lane.
9. Martin Laird. OWGR: 21. Sagarin: 43. Previous NOW rank: NR
His victory over a solid field on Sunday at Bay Hill was impressive in at least two ways -- he battled on a brutal course and came back after nearly succumbing to a 5-over start. Laird has been tenacious when it mattered in Orlando before -- on the last hole of the 2008 season at Disney World, he holed a must-have six-footer to finish No. 125 in earnings, keeping his card on the number. It's been onward and upward ever since. Dating to last fall, Laird has seven top-10 finishes. The victory at Bay Hill took some of the sting out of his final-round meltdown at the Bob Hope, where he played in the final group and bombed, finishing T22.
10. Rory McIlroy. OWGR: 8. Sagarin: 11. Previous NWO rank: 5
It was tempting to put scrappy Italian Francesco Molinari in this spot, given that he finished T3 at Doral three weeks ago and has climbed to No. 15 in the OWGR, but McIlroy remains a special talent capable of insanely low scores at any moment. Or, occasionally, an insanely high one, which led to a T70 finish at the windy Honda Classic four weeks ago. Still, that marks the lone time in five starts this year that he has finished worse that T17 on either of the major tours. In a month, the 21-year-old returns to Quail Hollow to defend his title -- every other player on this list has won, some more than once, since McIlroy's victory in Charlotte.

extracted from cbssports.com