Hot List Extra: SGI irons might fly higher and farther but do any feel soft?

The Super Game Improvement iron (SGI) category sometimes get an unfair rap. Just because these irons tend to target golfers who might need a little more help launching shots higher or generating a little more distance than they normally possess shouldn’t mean you shouldn’t consider them. No one in this game is too good to take advantage of a little extra help, and if there’s one thing we’ve found over more than two decades of player testing for the Hot List, it's most golfers find out very quickly that the extra help in their iron game shows instant benefits.

In fact, in our player testing for the 2025 Hot List, we saw that high-handicap players hit SGI irons farther and with less dispersion than the more widely sold Game Improvement irons.

But even with those benefits, the perception might be that SGI irons are clunky and clanky. Of course, like every technologically intriguing golf club development over the last three decades, improved performance in SGI irons has been closely followed by improved feel. That’s what we see in the SGI iron category today, including a few irons that might have been called GI irons just a few short years ago.

That’s one of the reasons that during the Hot List process we now ask our players to rate irons in what we call the category of Sensory in our Vector Ratings. Like most of our Hot List scoring vectors, the Sensory rating isn’t necessarily positive or negative. It’s an assessment across a spectrum from "soft" to "firm." We use a five-point scale where a 1 is softer and a 5 is firmer. In our minds, “soft” is cushioned, like a couch cushion that gives a bit more than expected, and “firm” is a meat tenderizer on a flank steak atop a carving board. Point is, some players gravitate toward a firmer feel; others want soft.

Still, the right kind of soft offers a kind of supportive element, receptive but substantial. As one of our players described the feel of one of our top SGI irons, “Like a king-sized Dux bed: soft in all the right places.” These new designs usually employ some type of vibration damper material within the head or cavity to soften the feel, and usually might take a relatively compact approach to size as opposed to embracing a fully oversized frame. (As the size of your iron gets larger, the amount of material a designer can employ to modulate a softer feel is largely reduced.) As for which players a softer feel will resonate with the most, our sense is that players with average to below average swing speeds (think of 7-iron carry distances less than 140 yards), tend to prefer irons rated on the softer side rather than the firmer side.

So if you think you have to give up a cushiony feel to get your shots to look better in flight, think again. Here are the SGI irons on the 2025 Hot List that our players rated the softest feeling: