When you come to think of it that is the secret of most of the great holes all over the world. They all have some kind of a twist. C.B. MACDONALD
It's been a while since I've been to Oakmont but the flyovers and green contour lines in these USGA flyovers remind what a great pair of holes these are.
It'll be interesting to see if that directional post behind the fifth green survives...
Nice to see the 6th green enlarged, as I vaguely recall it played a little too small during the 2007 U.S. Open.
There was a little grumbling about Texas not getting to replace the injured Beau Hossler and a lot of raving about the play by both Oregon and UT in the thrilling NCAA Men's finale.
Lance Ringler says "with so much on the line in college golf, it only makes sense to be able to change a lineup during the event."
For any change to be effective, substitution would have to be allowed for any reason, be it injury or poor performance. Leave it to the coach’s discretion, just as in other team sports.
With a national championship at stake, Hossler’s pivotal injury provided a textbook example of why substitutions in college golf make more sense than ever.
In a sport already teetering on the brink of serious have vs. have not, carrying another player to the national finals and incorporating a sixth player during the season would add another cost factor that college golf can't ignore. Ringler points out the topic is a regular topic at the coaches convention.
As I explained to Cara Robinson on Morning Drive, the resources were there at this year's final. But more often than not, injuries rarely happen and adding another cost wouldn't do college golf any good. Also note the highlights played as I'm talking, Brandt Packer and team really captured that final putt in style.
In chatting with a few golfers and media today, the joys of team match play became another prime takeaway for many from the event. Once again, the combination of head-to-head play and representing a larger institution other than one's self led to a different level of energy, tension and passion we do not get with stroke play. Once again, folks couldn't help but wonder how Olympic golf is not something similar to this, perhaps with three-person teams?
Kevin Casey of Golfweek takes a closer look at the national champions and some of their trevails from last week.
And in case you missed it, Beth Ann Nichols filed this on UT's fast-playing Taylor Funk, who ended up in the spotlight trying to help Texas win the title as things went to sudden death.
The overnights are in and SportsTVRatings says the three hour, forty minute telecast in east coast primetime averaged 325,000 viewers, with 94,000 from the only demo that matters. I'm not sure where that number lands, but that's definitely double any PGA Tour fall event and has to be one of the channel's higher rated non-PGA Tour live telecasts. Hopefully that helps Golf Channel's investment pay off with the combination of eyeballs and buzz.
Nice spot Patrick Kiernan to find another video of that enormous Buffalo Creek Golf Course gator in Palmetto, Florida.
Make sure to watch both to see how large he is compared to the nice-sized tree, and then to enjoy when he just collapses in joy on the grass for a Vitamin D and relaxation.
Mike Stachura breaks down the USGA-R&A report issued today on distance. It felt like an effort to buy time from having to act in a significant way. So they'll continue to lazily change courses, stare at their swelling hedge fund investments and quietly slide into irrelevancy due to public stance on distance that passes few basic smell tests to longtime observers of the sport. (Luke Kerr-Dineen did a nice job rounding up the reactions and explaining the debate for those new to the issue.)
Digging in on the current distances as acceptable while lengthening championship courses severely contradicts the (noble) efforts by the USGA's staff to make the game more sustainable (a correlation more and more golfers are making).
Couple in elements like going after anchored putters instead of distance, compiling massive vanity war chests and glossing over huge distance changes prior to cherry-picked years, and it adds up to damaged street cred.
Stachura got a sneak preview and was able to talk at length to the USGA's John Spitzer, a bright, level-headed fellow who is merely presenting what the data is telling him. But in one area I felt like he went a tad far in trying to discredit the potential jump in distance that 2016 is so far seeing.
“If you are looking to tell a story, you can cherry pick data and tell whatever story you want, and some of that has happened,” he said. “We just want to make sure that everyone knows that we are looking at this and we’re looking at it in a statistically significant and a statistically robust way.”
But as Stachura notes:
The report does not include any data on elite amateur players or even average golfers. Nor does it detail any of the results of USGA and R&A testing of shorter-distance golf balls. The ruling bodies requested these balls from manufacturers in 2005 as part of their research on distance and conducted a series of player tests over the last decade.
Spitzer said both of those areas may be part of future reports, and he indicated the plan is to release an update on distance research on an annual basis.
Furthermore, I've noticed that one of the primary arguments for possible distance and groove regulation in the past has been abandoned: the correlation between driving accuracy and success on the professional level. Not a peep in this report.
Brandel Chamblee's piece from two years ago on "total driving" remains relevant today in considering the old governing body stance on balancing the skillful acts of distance and accuracy.
Which brings us back to 2000. That year, Tiger Woods led in total driving, David Duval was second, Sergio Garcia third and Ernie Els seventh. It would be one of the last years that great driving mattered. Since then, it seems, the whole of professional golf is in the rough. Wild as the weeds they find there.
Here is the current Total Driving list from 2016, but an even more stark contrast in the have and have-nots is seen when looking at the Distance and Accuracy leaders.
I ask, based on your knowledge of the 2016 results and money, what list would you rather populate?
Let's humor the governing bodies and agree that there have been only minor distance gains since 2003, that all is well, that the leaps have been capped and, accordingly, no piece of golf equipment going forward will allow anyone to hit the ball significantly longer.
Just concede this: the gains made from 1998 to 2003 remain hugely destructive, expensive and counterproductive for the health of the game at the highest levels. After all, I'm pretty sure anchored putters never raised the cost of golf a cent, but the gains made in that five year stretch did untold damage to the planet by expanding the footprint of a modern golf course.
If you can concede that and the other side concedes that the current Overall Distance Standard is working, then why not tweak that standard to help bring hundreds of courses rendered irrelevant back to relevancy?
In 2003, that number increased to nine and it has kept climbing. Better athletes who have grown up not knowing what a persimmon miss looks like and who have optimized launch conditions are able to drive it significantly longer than their predecessors. So why not change that standard just a little bit to address this change in skill and restore relevancy to things like 6,900 yards, irons below the 8 and maybe only see a handful of players averaging over 300 yards off the tee instead of the 24 that currently do so?
Would that in any way damage the sport?
**Kris McEwan at Golficity breaks down the numbers and says the year-by-year analysis is "the equivalent of measuring the growth of a child and only reporting the year to year change. In turn, you are ignoring how much taller the child is actually getting across the overall span of time. Suddenly, you look at your kid twenty years later and he’s six feet tall and you’re asking yourself, 'when did that happen?!'"
Looking at the USGA's charts, he writes:
Take a look again at the red line representing the “measured holes” of the PGA TOUR. In 1992, with the advent of the over-sized driver, average driving distance is about 260 yards. Ten years later, players are hitting the ball an average of 20 yards farther with the driver.
Now let’s put that twenty additional yards to work in an actual scenario. A pro hits driver in 2002 on a par-4, 400 yard hole, that means his second shot is going to be 140 yards. In 2012, the same drive leaves him with 120 yards to the hole. Any hack on a municipal course on a Sunday morning will tell you how significant those twenty yards are.
Fast forward from 2002 to 2012 and pros are now hitting driver another ten yards farther. Meaning over a twenty year span, golfers on the PGA TOUR gained an extra 30 yards off the tee.
Oh, and before you tell me, “players today are in better shape and more athletic,” allow me to point out that the Champions Tour guys—you know, the old dudes—are hitting the ball 275 yards today versus 250 yards twenty years ago.
No one deserved to lose!
Such a dreaded cliche but so appropriate in the case of Oregon vs. Texas at Eugene Country Club, with two great teams and two of the best coaches on the planet reminding us for the 49,721st time that team match play golf is just a bigger, better beast.
So glad we kept it out of the Olympic Games.
Anyway, it was a viewing joy to watch Sulman Raza and Taylor Funk go to sudden death to decide the NCAA title, but kind of cruel to have a title come down to sudden death on one team's home course.
From Jay Coffin's GolfChannel.com game story:
Drama was oozing from both sides.
Then they played the matches.
Fast forward to the end, because that’s truly all that mattered on this day. With the matches tied 2-2, the championship was decided by a PGA Tour winner’s son (Texas sophomore Taylor Funk, Fred’s son) and a man who grew up in Eugene (Oregon junior Sulman Raza), the two playing in front of hundreds of Ducks fans hanging on every swing.
Then that match went three extra holes.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Kevin Casey at Golfweek.com on the road traveled by the host school:
But something was different this week. Well, not from the get-go. In the first round, Oregon, Golfweek‘s No. 22, played closer to its ranking than its host status, only getting out to a tie for 19th in the 30-team after 18 holes.
Martin gave his team just a bit of a kick in the rear end, and all was good the rest of the week.
The Ducks stormed up to a tie for fourth the next day and stayed comfortable inside the bubble, finishing the stroke play sixth – well within the top eight to make it to match play.
Then, after an early deficit to defending national champion LSU in the quarterfinals (Oregon trailed all five matches in the opening holes), the Ducks remained positive and turned it around in a 3-1-1 victory. They then took down juggernaut Illinois, 3-2.
Beth Ann Nichols at Golfweek.com on coach Casey Martin winning on the course he grew up playing.
After the round, Martin told Golf Channel's Steve Burkowski...
“They are just competitors. They worked hard and they are great players. It is all about these guys. I haven’t hit a shot, I just told them to breathe. That was the extent of my work. These guys did an awesome job. It is a special group and it is so awesome to bring this to Oregon.”
And...
“It is too hard to explain. We have never had a national championship. We had the individual champion, we had the team champion and the local boy made the putt to win it. It is just unbelievable.”
Brentley Romine on Texas handling the loss with class and Taylor Funk loving every minute of the immense playoff pressure.
And this from UT's Coach John Fields, always classy, especially in defeat, talking to Golf Channel's Curt Byrum after the last putt was made. He was clearly already aware that even in defeat, his team helped showcase college golf:
“You work really hard as a coach and for these players, you come with a dream that someday maybe you can do something special like this. For them [Oregon] to do it with their home crowd here is magnificent. It is good for college golf. It’s good for everybody concerned, but not us right now, because it is stinging. It will be tough for our guys. But that is what it is all about. You’ve got to keep getting better.”
The final round highlight package from Golf Central:
The winning putt by Raza:
Tracy Wilcox's Golfweek.com photo gallery is stellar as always.
Alex Myers with the blunt Twitter admission from the Canadian, who admitted on social that he wasn’t ready to play this week's Memorial due to what sound like yip issues.
Good on him for being honest.
That said, maybe it’s time to lose the playoff beard. Win twenty in The Show, and then you can have fungus on your shower shoes. To quote Crash Davis.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
