For the second week in a row, the PGA Tour course moves in a worrying direction

Despite a life built in journalism, arts, humanities and modeling – please excuse me – as one creative, at my core I’m a numbers guy. I think best through the lens of numbers, decimals, and bell curves. Yeah, I really like seeing the shine inside the ropes at a tour venue. But I also really enjoy sitting in Mark Broadie’s university office talking about the various Z-scores of the 104th player in the world.

All of this makes it so hard for me to watch some of the golf talk of the past week. Two tracks hosting the PGA Tour this month – Riviera Country Club AND PGA National Champion Course – both had to make numerous changes to the scoreboard before the tournament. And can you guess in which direction these changes moved?

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

That’s the way pro golf at the highest level this year, last year, next year and every year for decades. Changes in equipment, fitness, strategy, course layout, etc., have almost exclusively forced Tour players to play the game as long as they can. The story is not new. Driving is never shorter.

So let’s dive into this week’s changes in the I knowt Classic. For starters, the second par at PGA National has been increased in size and lengthened by 20 yards, bringing that par 4 to 484 yards. He averaged 4.1 last year, with the main strategy being to draw a driver and set up a short iron. The alternative would be to layup with a 3-wood approach to the mid-iron.

With an extra 20 yards on the card, will the second play harder? Maybe just a touch. But optically, this is a great example of how golf course setups start to swallow golf course real estate bit by bit. As you can see in the image below, a red star has been placed on last year’s green and a blue circle reflects the new tee area, located more directly behind the first green bunker.

Can we easily call the second hole fully maxed out now? Or will the future call for a terrain that lies in peril like a peninsula? Who will build that bank? This longest, longest, longest chase seems to have reached its climax on the second hole. But how does this affect 1? Will it force players to stop on the fairway as they wait for the competitors, corpses and volunteers to settle into place around the second tee, with it directly in their sights as they approach the first green?

These are the questions we can ask at GOLF.com, only hoping that the people who make these decisions ask those questions, too. (Leaving aside the discussion of hardware returns, of course.) Let’s move on to the 18th.

The finishing hole at PGA National has also been lengthened this year, adding an extra 36 yards and making the par 5 592 yards. He has routinely punted for 556 yards over the past 14 years, with players averaging between 4.49 and 4.78 punts over the past six years. It is, by far, one of the easiest holes on the course. But does that mean it should last longer? We ask, again, because Joe Highsmith’s 26-hole won the tournament the year before in record-breaking fashion.

As a proxy, the 18th hole can stand for so many of the talking points surrounding the course setup of a PGA Tour event. When played softly, taller players can reach the green in two with cuffs in hand. One way to eliminate this fraud would be to strengthen the course and not monitor it in pursuit of a green-green-green aesthetic.

“It’s going to play easier than I prefer,” Shane Lowry said Wednesday ahead of this week’s event. “It’s going to look great on TV, nice and green. But maybe I’d like to see a bit more of the old traditional setup. I like that the rough is a bit thicker this year.”

Another way to make the hole more difficult is, as always, to simply add length. While it’s not the only route, it’s one the Tour and PGA National have gone down, building a new tee box in an area where there was a hospitality entrance last year. This new course configuration is quite literally causing tournament operations to change things, which you can see in the image below.

To that end, the hole will arguably play to a higher scoring average this year. We can say so because there is some evidence from the earliest days of this tournament. The 18th at PGA National actually played up to 604 yards in the 2000s and early 2010s. In 2011, players averaged 4.99 strokes on the 18th thanks to a tee that was pushed into a peninsula. Again, that land is now commanded by the host infrastructure.

With all that in mind, it’s fair to ask, is this the longest 18th hole ever to be played in Tour events? Yes, it is LIKELY maximum now. There’s nowhere else to go, which has become an all-too-common six-word refrain about staging professional players. The 17th tee on the famous fairway hole at St. Andrews was pushed back through a walking path for the 2022 Open. The 14th tee was also pushed back from the old course property, and to the edge of the Eden course. longer, longer always longer. Like last week.

Already one of the toughest par 3s on the PGA Tour, the 4th at Riviera Country Club pushed players to 273 yards for last week’s Genesis Invitational, nearly 40 yards longer than the previous time it was played in 2024. What was a pretty tough hole at 236 yards, 23 yard average — playing. I thought, nowhere to go back! Extending it as is would have entered the 18th hole fairway pretty quickly as you can see in the images below. Instead, Riviera cut into the hillside below its mega-million-dollar neighbors and created five new boxes in a straight line alongside the 18th.

How did the players fit in last week? Hole bincreased between 220 and 262 yards during the event, but with soft and wet conditions, the score was largely unchanged: 3.11. The players’ attitudes, however, were mostly lowered.

The real take may lie in the timing of the event. Played during the winter, the grass conditions surrounding the green can be a bit softer and more inviting than many would prefer. In July and August, by itself, Riviera has to play much harder, and so the lift zone in this red hole would allow for greater creativity and impact. As well as a greater penalty for badly hit shots. The good thing: we’ll see him play a lot. Riv will host the US Women’s Open in June, the Olympics in August 2028 and, if the Genesis Invitational moves on the PGA Tour calendar, possibly many summers into the future.