It might be one of the most talked about, least understood, most glossed-over topics in pro golf: Pace of Play. It becomes a talking point on Friday evenings when a tournament cannot get a cut made before sundown. It becomes a talking point when the Tour plans to limit field sizes at tournaments in the spring, where daylight is limited. It becomes a talking point when videos go viral over players waggling, waffling and doing anything but hitting the damn ball.
But is the discourse … informed? Not nearly as much as it could be. Or rather, not nearly as much as it will be moving forward as the Tour has begun opening the books (slightly) to share more pace of play information with viewers, starting this week at the Rocket Classic in Detroit.
For the last two months, the Tour has implemented Distance Measuring Devices (rangefinders) for use on the PGA and Korn Ferry tours, and has found it has unsurprisingly saved time in numerous areas on the course. A majority (58%) of players surveyed believe it has helped improve overall pace of play, and the data backs it up, particularly close to the green, which the Tour highlighted in a roundtable with media Wednesday. Shots from 40-60 yards were played roughly five seconds faster with the use of rangefinders than previously.
The Tour plans to make hole- and group-specific pace of play data more available in its digital offerings, from the Tour leaderboard to the CBS, NBC and ESPN broadcasts we see each week. Since pace of play is a Tour rules issue, it is monitored by the Tour’s rules management app, which tracks when any player from a group plays the first shot on a hole, up until the last player of that group holes out on a specific hole.
The average time groups are playing specific holes are now shared publicly in the “course” section of “live round” tracking on the Tour’s website, which you can see on the far right below. Throughout the majority of Thursday’s opening round, groups played the 1st hole in 12 minutes and 31 seconds.
Some groups played faster than 12:31; others played slower. But those numbers matter because they are held up against what the PGA Tour calls “Time Par,” or the expected time it should take a group to play specific holes. To play par 3s in threesomes, the Tour’s Time Par is 11 minutes. To play par 4s in threesomes — like the 1st hole at Detroit Golf Club — Time Par is 14 minutes. To see nearly the entire first round of groups play under 12.5 minutes is a Time Par win.
Where this comes into play is if players are considered “out of position” — in simple terms, if they are too far behind the group ahead of them — and violating Time Par. That’s when the PGA Tour rules staff will step in and time players, give warnings, put a group on the clock, etc. To better help fans understand what this looks like, the Tour is ready to include pace-of-play information in its broadcasts, particularly showing when, and why, groups are “on the clock.”
One such example happened during the Memorial Tournament last month, where Scottie Scheffler and Ben Griffin were put on the clock in the middle of the final round. Future broadcasts will be equipped with timings that the group took to finish each hole. The Scheffler-Griffin group was considered “in position” while playing holes 7-11, but on the 12th hole they were “out of position” and thus the rules officials needed to see how they were playing in regards to Time Par.
The answer: not great! Scheffler and Griffin — while playing one of the toughest courses on the Tour calendar — had missed Time Par on each of those six holes by a collective 31 minutes and 46 seconds. In essence, they had been playing each hole five minutes slower than expected, which wouldn’t be their fault if they were “in position,” but they no longer were. So rules officials stepped in.
Now, the data of how long groups like the Scheffler-Griffin group were playing individual holes will be offered to broadcast partners to share with audiences. It will look something like the box below.
Now, no one knows the ebb and flow of Time Par like PGA Tour rules officials, and how that can fluctuate greatly from day to day with changes to weather, conditions and hole locations. The length of time it takes pros to play certain tee shots will also be made available to broadcast partners. When a long par 3 has a hole cut in the center of the green, players may play their shots as much as 10 seconds faster than when a hole is cut in a tucked corner of the putting surface. More than anything, it will help explain why a particular shot requires a lot more thought than on previous days.
While this information is a positive step in the transparency department, where the Tour stops short is addressing publicly any pace of play issues with specific players. Player averages are kept mostly confidential. But not so coincidentally, individuality of pace is how the topic is most often discussed by pros — delineating which actors are fast and which ones are slow, perhaps making life worse for their playing partners.
For now at least, Tour fans will be receiving information focused exclusively on holes or entire groups, not individuals. Due to the intricacies of the game and specific rounds on specific courses, individual data can trend in the noisy direction. In other words, if a slow player is having a good scoring day, they may not appear quite as tardy (by comparison) as a faster player who cards a 76.
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