Rory McIlroy makes a surprising gear change ahead of the PGA Tour season debut

Rory McIlroy’s bag looks a lot more like Rory McIlroy’s bag.

After experimenting with a set TaylorMade P7CB cavity back irons Over the past two months, excited about it, McIlroy has made a somewhat shocking decision to return to his RORS PROTO blades for his PGA Tour season debut at Pebble Beach this week.

“That experiment is over, back to the familiar irons I’ve played basically my entire career,” McIlroy said.

McIlroy first made the switch in early December by using P7CB long irons at the Australian Open. He liked the grass interaction and forgiveness so much that by the weekend he was switching to the full set of P7CBs to the 9-iron. He kept them in the bag during his TGL performances in January and the first two official starts of the season in Dubai on the DP World Tour.

“If there is help to be had, I will definitely take it,” McIlroy said at the Dubai Invitational. “And even in Dubai late last year, I hit a couple of 5-irons that I hit a little bit wrong, and instead of it coming up maybe five or seven yards short, it came up more like 10 to 15 yards short.”

But when he arrived at Pebble Beach this week for his PGA Tour season debut, his RORS PROTOs that he has used almost exclusively since signing with TaylorMade were back in the bag.

For McIlroy, the decision had nothing to do with the launch conditions of cavity ridge forgiveness, but rather the dispersion pattern. McIlroy said he began to notice a legal bias.

“So whatever the weight of the head was or whether it was the length of the blade,” said McIlroy, this week’s defending champion, “I would make swings that I feel like I would make with my blades that would be a very neutral ball flight, and then with the hollow backs they would just start to deviate to the right.”

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That’s not necessarily a bad thing for McIlroy, who doesn’t like to see the ball go left. Although the P7CB is a compact ‘cavity-back’ iron, designed to give a blade player like McIlroy a more forgiving option without sacrificing appearance or performance, it has a slightly longer blade length than the RORS PROTO.

While this may not be the only cause of McIlroy’s perceived right bias, a longer head length will slow the closing speed at impact, making it easier to leave the clubface slightly open.

McIlroy initially liked the right bias in practice, but once he started playing more competitively, he realized it felt unnatural to him.

“It made me feel like I could completely release my iron shots, which is great in theory and great in practice, but once you’re out on the course with a card in your hand, I’ve been used to the feeling of being deferred through impact for so many years and then going from there to trying to release it, it was just a different feeling, especially under pressure or in the heat of competition,” he said. “It just didn’t feel as familiar as I wanted.”

Does this really mean the end of McIlroy’s experiments with hollow backs? Probably not.

In fact, this was probably a very useful experiment for McIlroy and TaylorMade. Both sides know McIlroy wants the extra forgiveness, but now they know he needs a head that doesn’t require him to change his swing tendencies, even though he thought he might like it.

Getting a little right bias out of the P7CB shouldn’t be too difficult, whether it means shortening the blade length or moving some weight a little closer to the Hosel. Perhaps that will be the goal of TaylorMade’s next cavity-back iron, now that they know McIlroy is open to change.

If McIlroy’s experiments show us anything, it’s that his blades can still find their way out of the bag in due time.

The author welcomes your comments at Jack.Hirsh@golf.com.

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