For second straight week, PGA Tour course moves in troubling direction

Despite a life constructed in journalism, the humanities, the humanities and fashioning myself — please forgive me — as a artistic, at my core I’m a numbers man. I believe finest by way of the lens of digits, decimals and bell curves. Yes, I enormously take pleasure in seeing brilliance contained in the ropes at a Tour web site. But I additionally actually love sitting in Mark Broadie’s college workplace speaking about varied skillset Z-scores of the 104th-ranked participant in the world.

All of which makes it so onerous for me to look previous a few of the golf course conversations of the final week. Two tracks that host the PGA Tour this month — The Riviera Country Club and PGA National’s Champion course — each needed to make a number of modifications to the scorecard forward of the event. And are you able to guess which direction these modifications moved?

Longer. Of course, longer! Always longer. (Fifty-six yards longer this week!)

Such is the best way of professional golf on the highest stage this yr, final yr, subsequent yr and yearly for many years. Changes in gear, health, technique, course setup, and so forth., have virtually completely compelled Tour gamers to play this sport so long as they probably can. The story is not new. The direction is rarely shorter.

So let’s dive into this week’s modifications on the They cogniset Classic. For starters, the 2nd tee at PGA National has elevated in dimension and been lengthened by 20 yards, tipping that par 4 out to 484 yards. It performed to a 4.1 common final yr, with the premier technique being to attract a driver and arrange a brief iron. The various could be laying again with a 3-wood to a mid-iron method.

With an additional 20 yards on the cardboard, will the 2nd play tougher? Maybe only a contact. But optically, this can be a nice instance of how golf course setups begin to swallow golf course property little by little. As you may see in the picture under, a purple star has been positioned ultimately yr’s teeing floor, and a blue circle displays the brand new teeing space, located extra straight behind the first greenside bunker.

Can we comfortably name the 2nd gap absolutely maxed out now? Or will the longer term name for a teeing floor that extends into the hazard like a peninsula? Who goes to construct that dock? This longer, longer, longer pursuit has appeared to achieve its peak on the 2nd gap. But how does that impression the first? Will it power gamers to pause in the first fairway as they watch for opponents, caddies and volunteers to shuffle into place across the 2nd tee, with it straight in their eyesight approaching the first inexperienced?

These are the questions we will ask on GOLF.com, hoping solely that the folks making these choices ask these questions, too. (Leaving the dialogue on gear rollback apart, of course.) Let’s transfer to the 18th.

The ending gap at PGA National has additionally been lengthened this yr, including an additional 36 yards and tipping the par 5 out to 592 yards. He has routinely performed round 556 yards over the past 14 years, with gamers averaging between 4.49 and 4.78 strokes in the final six years. It is, by par, one of many simpler holes on the course. But does that imply it ought to get longer? We ask, once more, as a result of Joe Highsmith’s 26-under received the event a yr in the past in record-breaking trend.

As a proxy, the 18th gap can stand for therefore most of the speaking factors round course setup of a PGA Tour occasion. When you could have performed mushy, the longest gamers can attain the inexperienced in two with irons in hand. One path towards eliminating that trick could be to agency up the course and never oversee it in pursuit of a green-green-green aesthetic.

“It’s going to play easier than I prefer,” Shane Lowry mentioned Wednesday forward of this week’s occasion. “It’s going to look great on TV, lovely and green. But I probably would like to see a bit more of the old traditional setup. I like that the rough is a bit thicker this year.”

Another path to creating the outlet play tougher is, as ever, merely including size. Although it is not the one path, it is the one the Tour and PGA National have landed on, constructing a brand new tee field in an space the place a hospitality entrance existed final yr. This new course setup very actually is inflicting event operations to shift issues round, which you’ll be able to see in the picture under.

To that finish, the outlet will unquestionably play to the next scoring common this yr. We can say so as a result of there’s some proof from the earliest days of this event. The 18th at PGA National really used to play to 604 yards again in the 2000s and early 2010s. In 2011, gamers averaged 4.99 strokes on the 18th, due to a tee that had been pushed out onto a peninsula. Again, that land is now commandeered by hospitality infrastructure.

Given all that, it is truthful to ask, is that this the longest the 18th gap will ever play for Tour occasions? Yes, it’s doubtless maxed out now. There is nowhere else to go, which has turn into a far too widespread six-word chorus concerning staging professional golfers. The seventeenth tee on the well-known Road Hole at St. Andrews was pushed backward throughout a strolling path for the 2022 Open. The 14th tee was pushed again off the property of the Old Course, too, and onto the sting of the Eden Course. Longer, longer, all the time longer. Just like final week.

Already one of the troublesome par 3s on the PGA Tour, the 4th at Riviera Country Club pushed gamers again to 273 yards for final week’s Genesis Invitational, almost 40 yards longer than the earlier time it was performed in 2024. What was a a lot troublesome gap at 236 yards — taking part in to a mean of three.2 in 2024 — had, you guessed it, nowhere to go backward! Lengthening it as is would have run into the teeing floor of the 18th gap moderately rapidly, as you may see in the pictures under. Instead, Riviera minimize into the hillside beneath its mega-million-dollar neighbors and original 5 model new tee containers in a straight line alongside the 18th.

How did that swimsuit the gamers final week? The hole bounced between 220 and 262 yards in the course of the occasion, however with mushy, moist circumstances, the scoring was largely unchanged: 3.11. Players attitudes, nonetheless, largely dipped.

The actual takeaway could relaxation in the occasion’s timing. Played in the course of the winter, the circumstances of the grass surrounding the inexperienced generally is a bit softer and grabbier than what many would like. In July and August, per se, Riviera ought to play lots firmer, and thus the run-up space to this redan gap would enable for larger creativity and shot-making. As properly as larger punishment for poorly struck photographs. The good factor: we’re about to see that play out lots. Riv will host the US Women’s Open in June, the Olympics in August of 2028 and, if the Genesis Invitational moves round on the PGA Tour calendar, probably in many summers of the longer term.