For the second week in a row, the PGA Tour is heading in a troubling direction

Despite a life built in journalism, the arts, the humanities and myself – please forgive me – as one creatively, At my core I am a numbers person. I think best through the lens of numbers, decimals, and bell curves. Yes, I really enjoy seeing brilliance on 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 ranked player in the world.

All of this makes it so hard for me to look past some of the golf course conversations this past week. Two courses hosting the PGA Tour this month – Riviera Country Club and PGA National’s Champion course – both had to make multiple scorecard changes ahead of the tournament. And can you guess in which direction these changes have gone?

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

This is the way pro golf at the highest level is happening this year, last year, next year and every year for decades. Changes in equipment, fitness, strategy, course setup, etc. have forced almost exclusively Tour players to play this game for as long as possible. The story is not new. The direction is never shorter.

So let’s take a look at this week’s changes at the Cognizant Classic. For starters, the second tee at PGA National has been enlarged and extended by 20 yards, pushing the par 4 to 484 yards. Last year the team played an average of 4.1, with the main strategy being to pull a driver and put on a short iron. The alternative would be to sit back with a 3 wood to a mid iron approach.

Will the 2nd play more difficult with an extra 20 meters on the card? Maybe just a touch. But visually, this is a good example of how golf course setups are starting to eat up golf course ownership little by little. As you can see in the image below, a red star has been placed on last year’s teeing area and a blue circle reflects the new teeing area, more directly behind the first greenside bunker.

Can we now comfortably call the second hole at maximum level? Or will the future call for a teeing ground that extends like a peninsula into the danger? Who will build that dock? This longer, longer, longer chase seemed to reach its climax on the second hole. But how does that affect the 1st? Will it force players to pause on the first fairway as they wait for competitors, caddies and volunteers to shuffle into place around the second tee as it approaches the first green directly in their view?

These are the questions we can ask at GOLF.com, in the hopes that the people making these decisions will ask these questions too. (Of course, we’ll leave aside the discussion about rolling back equipment.) Let’s move on to the 18th.

The finishing hole at PGA National has also been extended this year, adding 36 yards and tipping the par 5 to 592 yards. Over the past 14 years, the team has routinely rushed for approximately 556 yards, with players averaging between 4.49 and 4.78 passing yards over the past six years. It is, at par, one of the easier holes on the course. But does that mean it has to be longer? We ask again because Joe Highsmith’s 26-year-olds won the tournament in record-breaking fashion a year ago.

As a proxy, the 18th hole can stand for many of the talking points surrounding the course construction of a PGA Tour event. When playing softly, the tallest players can reach the green in pairs with irons in hand. One way to eliminate that trick would be to firm up the rate and not oversee it in pursuit of a green-green-green stylish.

“It’s going to be easier to play than I prefer,” Shane Lowry said Wednesday ahead of this week’s event. “It looks great on TV, nice and green. But I’d probably 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 playing the hole more difficult is, as always, to simply add length. While not the only path, it is the path the Tour and PGA National have embarked on, building a new tee box in an area where a catering entrance existed last year. This new course layout literally changes things up for tournament operations, which you can see in the image below.

Therefore, the hole will undoubtedly achieve a higher scoring average this year. We can say this because there is some evidence from the early days of this tournament. The 18th at PGA National actually played 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 onto a peninsula. Again, that land is now being claimed by the hospitality infrastructure.

Given all this, one wonders if this will be the longest 18th hole ever for Tour events? Yes, that’s true probably now maxed out. There’s nowhere else to go, which has become an all-too-common six-word refrain regarding professional golfer organizing. The 17th tee at the famous Road Hole in St. Andrews was pushed back along a walkway for the 2022 Open. The 14th tee was also pushed back from the Old Course grounds and onto the edge of the Eden Course. Longer, longer, always longer. Just like last week.

The 4th at Riviera Country Club was already one of the toughest par 3s on the PGA Tour, pushing players back to 273 yards for last week’s Genesis Invitational, almost 40 yards longer than the last time it was played in 2024. What was a pretty tough hole at 236 yards – playing to an average of 3.2 in 2024 – had, you guessed it, nowhere to go back to! Extending it would have ended up in the tee box of hole 18 quite quickly, as you can see in the images below. Instead, Riviera cut into the hill below its mega-million dollar neighbors and crafted five brand new tee boxes in a straight line along the 18th.

How did the players like that last week? The hole bounced between 220 and 262 yards during the event, but in soft, wet conditions the score remained largely unchanged at 3.11. However, the players’ attitudes largely declined.

The real takeaway may lie in the timing of the event. When playing in winter, the grass conditions surrounding the green can be a bit softer and more compact than many would like. In July and August, Riviera would necessarily have to play a lot firmer, and so the approach area to this Redan hole would allow for more creativity and passing skills. As well as a higher penalty for poorly hit shots. The good thing: We’re about to see that play out 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.