An ‘outside the box’ solution for slow play
SAN DIEGO – Depending on who is opining, slow play on the PGA Tour can be solved with a Draconian combination of penalties and public shaming or, in an increasingly common refrain, is simply the byproduct of an outdoor sport and is unfixable.
It’s a problem as old as the Tour itself and if there were a magical fix the circuit would have stumbled on it by now. It’s also worth pointing out that while media, social and otherwise, have once again zeroed in on slow play the topic didn’t even come up during three separate Player Advisory Council committee meetings this week at Torrey Pines.
Maverick McNealy sat in for one of those PAC meetings as a member of the business committee and while the group never talked about pace of play he has thoughts on the topic.
First, McNealy’s bona fides. He has a degree in management science and engineering from Stanford and stunned many of the Tour’s deep thinkers last year when he identified the inequalities in the season-long points race, which prompted the circuit to adjust how those points are now awarded.
It’s no surprise that for McNealy, who won his first Tour event last fall at the RSM Classic, the issue with slow play is in the numbers.
“We played twosomes today, I don’t know what the pace was but we were moving. We played Torrey Pines, if you want to build a golf course that takes a long time you’re going to build it 7,900 yards with really thick rough where you have to lay up half the time you miss a fairway and super-fast, sloppy greens,” McNealy said following a third-round 68 at the Genesis Invitational that moved him into a tie for 10th place. “If we could play twosomes more, we’re handcuffed a little bit by TV finish times. I’m actually surprised by how much is dictated by the TV window. So, if we have to finish at a certain time we can’t play twosomes. If we play twosomes it’s almost an hour automatically off the pace of play.”
If the concept of fewer players adds up to faster rounds doesn’t exactly sound groundbreaking consider that Saturday’s pace at Torrey Pines was, on average, over an hour faster than play on Thursday and Friday. For McNealy, the need for twosomes to improve pace of play goes well beyond the simple numbers.
“[Playing in twosomes] exposes slower players,” McNealy explained. “When the round is going really slowly, slow players can play slow and they kind of get covered up and they don’t have that pressure. In twosomes today, we had to move. If you hit one or two bad shots and you’re scrambling you have to move to get back into position. That forces the slow players to play faster.”
Some players, including Rory McIlroy, pushed back on recent calls to improve the pace of play, telling reporters this week, “There’s some things we can do to speed it up, but whether that takes a five-and-a-half-hour round to a five-hour-and-15 [minute] round, I don’t think it’s going to make such an astonishing change.”
While most would agree with McIlroy that a 15-minute improvement wouldn’t make much difference, shaving an hour off average rounds would certainly be noticeable and for McNealy it dovetails with the circuit’s move to smaller fields across the board starting next season.
“This is a bit of an outside-the-box thought, but we should have 60-and-tie cuts because we have too many players playing on the weekend. If 78 players make the cut now we have, essentially, a 78-player wave that’s a 156 [player field],” McNealy said. “We made this huge deal about making fields smaller, down to 120 or 132 next year because of pace of play but that only solves Thursday and Friday. If 78 guys make the weekend and Saturday and Sunday, when the most people are watching and the broadcast window matters the most, we’re still playing with a big wave.”
McNealy went on to explain that unlike the Tour’s move to smaller fields starting in 2026, a sweeping change that also forced the circuit to trim away fully exempt members, reducing the cut from the current top 65 players and ties to the top 60 wouldn’t take away playing opportunities.
“Everyone still plays. Making the field smaller only improves two rounds of pace of play, making the cut slightly smaller would improve the pace of play on the weekend,” McNealy said.
McNealy doesn’t think slow play can be solved with a quick fix and there are times, like Thursday at Torrey Pines when a driving rain and winds that gusted to 25 mph led to the year’s most difficult scoring conditions, when long rounds are inevitable.
“I was last off on Thursday and played nine holes in sideways rain and it was a really long day because we were always doing something because the conditions were so hard,” McNealy said. “There’s no way to really be much faster while still giving it a decent effort. Those conditions weren’t conducive to anything except six-hour [rounds].”
Two days later, under bright blue southern California skies and just a slight breeze, McNealy quickly crunched the numbers following a round that took less than four hours to complete, “Playing twosomes is an amazingly fun and enjoyable experience for players over threesomes,” he smiled.