Players 2025: The PGA Tour knows pace of play is a problem. Here's what they're doing about it

PONTE VEDRA BEACH — The worst thing you can say to the PGA Tour's trio of time czars—Gary Young, senior VP of Rules & Competition; Stephen Cox, VP of rules & Tournament Administration; and Billy Schroder, senior VP of Competition Special Projects—is that the tour just doesn't do anything about pace of play.

On the contrary, it's a problem they think about constantly, and one they've spent years trying to fix. If you could grant them a single wish, it would be to end slow play forever, but if you granted them any wish except that one, they'd like the public to understand the high degree of difficulty in the fix. They want you to know how much effort they expend against long odds—imagine, at the lowest moments, stars hurling themselves into a black hole—to crack the code.

None of which changes the fact that it's a legitimate problem. Cox, in particular, didn't mince words about the reality on the ground.

"Generally speaking," he said, "it's fair to say that round times are getting slightly worse ... our analysis is telling us that this journey we're on, we're going in the wrong direction."

That sounds like a dire pronouncement on its face, and the situation reached a nadir in January at the Farmers Insurance Open, when Dottie Pepper called out the slow pace on the CBS broadcast—a previously unthinkable act of mini-rebellion. As Golf Digest's Joel Beall wrote, "time seemed to stand still as Saturday's final pairing in the final round labored through nine holes in three hours—a pace that mirrored the previous weekend's American Express tournament, where the last group's closing round stretched to nearly six hours."

Worse, they know the perception will take another hit this week at the Players Championship, when they all but guaranteed that the second round won't conclude on Friday, even with the idle weather conditions in the forecast.

"We're teeing off two minutes after sunrise, and I think the time between the last tee time and sunset is something like four hours and 10 minutes," Cox said. "We're not going to finish."

When that reality comes to pass, the discourse on slow play will rise again, just as it rises each year during the West Coast Swing before ebbing during the much faster signature events. But what they want you to know, most of all, is that it's not a hopeless case. They're on it, and they think they're close to a breakthrough—a perception that was bolstered by Tuesday's announcement at TPC Sawgrass that the tour is taking several imminent measures to attack the problem.

Talk to them long enough, and you might believe them.

In the course of conversations with all three men, their optimism stemmed from seven key changes—some imminent, some potential and others, for now, mostly theoretical—that they believe will usher in a new and permanent era of quicker play on the PGA Tour.

Solution 1: Reduced field sizes coming in 2026

The simplest fix of all, but likely the most important, is headed their way next year. To put it mildly, they can't wait.

"The change in field size is probably the most dramatic and most significant change," Schroder said. "When the golf course is not crowded, the assembly line, so to speak, isn't packed. You have more flow, and you have a better flow."

At tournaments like the Players Championship, the total number of players will go down from 144 to 120, and across the board, reduced fields abound (there are 13 tournaments with 156 players in the field this year, but in 2026 only The American Express, which is played on three courses, will remain that size).

Two years ago, I rode with Gary Young at the Wells Fargo Championship to get an up close view on how the tour deals with pace of play in real time. One point he emphasized was that fields of 156 require 52 threesomes sent off in morning and afternoon waves of 26 each. Even with groups starting on both the first and 10th holes, the situation arose again and again that pace would be great until players made the turn, at which point they'd have to suffer through a slow back nine while fans suffered with them.

Young said back then that 144 players is the threshold beyond which delay becomes inevitable, and he repeated the sentiment last week. The reduced field sizes were controversial with membership—it takes away playing opportunities, after all—but they will be a welcome change for the tour officials trying to keep rounds to a reasonable length, to the point that they're "so, so desperate" for 2026 to arrive.

"If I was going to dream up 10 bullet points for the best golf tournament in the world," Cox said, "I know for one that I wouldn't be teeing off in insufficient daylight. You know, 'here's the deal, you're going to warm up in the dark.' OK, hold on a minute, I thought you were supposed to be coming up with the best potential guidelines … nobody in their right mind would dream that up. So we know that next Thursday when we don't finish, that people are going to go after us because we don't play quick enough."

Cox and the others know that the reduced field sizes aren't a magic bullet to cure every pace problem, but they do expect the changes to be immediate and dramatic. As a point of comparison this year, the Genesis Open—held at Torrey Pines, the same place that prompted Dottie Pepper to criticize the Tour—the twosomes on Sunday finished in four hours, a full hour and 40 minutes ahead of the threesomes from Sunday at the Farmers.

Solution 2: The "speed of play" working group

Imagine that you're driving on a highway in rush hour traffic, and the driver in the car ahead of you falls briefly asleep. As traffic moves forward, the car doesn't move, and a gap opens ahead. Finally, you honk your horn, the driver wakes up and pulls ahead. The gap closes, and soon you're back where you were before. Despite the driver's lapse, you won't arrive home any later.

When a player grinds over a putt for two minutes and 15 seconds, as Aaron Rai did at the Mexico Open, it's like the case of the sleepy driver in the sense that it often has no effect on total round time; the larger traffic jam is unaffected. But what the tour has realized lately is that it's still extremely annoying for fans to watch a player take two minutes to putt, and it gets even more annoying when it happens at the end of tournaments.

In other words, the "speed" of play matters just as much to fans, if not more, than overall pace.

"I keep using the term 'speed of play,'" Young said, "because when we say pace of play, the overall time that it takes to play a round of golf, I don't think that's really what our fans were getting frustrated with. I think they were getting frustrated with particular players' speed of play—how long it took them to hit an individual shot.”

Added Schroder: "Most fans, and certainly all casual fans, come into the telecast or the digital platform, and they have an hour or two hours when they're watching whatever's in front of them. They see slow play behavior, or a ruling take too long, or a backup on a tee box, and what happens for the fan is they immediately either change the channel, or they get a bad perception about golf being slow."

Young said that things hit a low point at the Farmers at Torrey Pines, when Pepper called them out on air, and in response they convened a speed-of-play working group. That included Young, Cox, Schroder, and a handful of players, including Sam Burns, Jhonattan Vegas, and Adam Schenk, each of whom volunteered. They've met twice so far, and their momentum was immediate, as Tuesday's announcement showed.

Solution 3: Rangefinders

"One of the players in the working group felt strongly that using a distance measuring device, or a laser, as we know it, would certainly help with pace of play," Young said.

On this suggestion, they're acting fast—starting at the RBC Heritage after the Masters, and continuing through the Truist Championship just before the PGA Championship, tour officials will allow players to use rangefinders and gather data to assess whether it actually has a material effect on speed of play. (More specifically, the tour will not enforce the model local rule that’s in effect other weeks of the year prohibiting DMD use by players and caddies.) That stretch on the calendar will encompass two signature events, the team event at the Zurich, two alternate field events, and a 156-player field at the Byron Nelson, which they hope will give them a solid sample size.

To my ears, all three men sounded at least slightly pessimistic about the project. The obvious idea is that it reduces the amount of time it takes to get yardages, but they've run an experiment on the Korn Ferry Tour in the past and didn't find "any real positive results." Still, Young suspects that in the smaller signature events, where it's more difficult to keep pace with the group ahead, distance measuring devices might help. They'll know soon enough.

Solution 4: Public Shaming—release of player data

At the start of our conversation, I wanted to talk about the potential for a shot clock, but according to Young, they already have one, and it's called Shotlink.

"Our technology in the background, which is invisible, is monitoring every shot and capturing that timestamp on each player," Young said. "And going forward, sharing that information possibly with our fans on a player's average stroke time. We've never shared that information, but in the future, that may be something that the membership gets behind. We think that would change behavior."

They will not like the fact that I'm using the term "public shaming"—they corrected me several times when I used words like "shame" and "humiliation," preferring "peer pressure" at the harshest—but the fact remains that all of them believe the release of individual player data could have a massive deterrent effect on individual slow players.

Two years ago, Young told me he believed it was close to happening because the players were taking an "ownership mindset." He was right—on Tuesday, commissioner Jay Monahan announced that pace-of-play data will be released in the near future, including statistics on individual players. How that will look, when it will happen and how comprehensive it will be remains to be seen. But it has passed through the Player Advisory Council and PGA Tour Policy Board, proving the players have turned a philosophical corner on public data even though it could potentially embarrass some of them.

(Schroder made a convincing argument that deterrence isn't the only benefit. He outlined a scenario where collective stats could give you insight on the difficulty of a hole—how much longer do players stew over the tee shot on the island green at Sawgrass versus an ordinary par 3, or how an individual player's average stroke time changes, faster or slower, in pressure situations.)

Solution 5: Tweaking the penalty structure

There are currently four steps in the slow-play penalty process before a stroke penalty is assessed—a warning, then a timing (getting put on the clock), a "freebie" if another bad time is given and then the stroke penalty. The headline here is that in 2024, a grand total of zero stroke penalties were handed out for slow play.

"We're asking the players, what do they think of that four-step process," Young said, "and which part of it should go in order to possibly eliminate one of those phases to get to a penalty stroke."

A new system, getting rid of the "freebie" and turning the stroke penalty into a three-step process, will be implemented on Korn Ferry Tour soon, and based on results there, it could move to the PGA Tour. It sounds a good deal like the LPGA's similar new policy going into effect later this month.

Aside from the current four-step process leading to a penalty stroke, there is also a system of fines for getting a bad time while on the clock. In 2025, the fine structure was $50,000 for the 10th instance of being timed, and $5,000 for successive breaches, plus fines of $10,000 for getting a "bad time" while on the clock two times, and $20,000 for later violations. However, Collin Morikawa's sentiment on Tuesday seems to reflect the opinion of a lot of players: "What I've learned is that monetary fines are useless."

Solution 6: A physical shot clock? Probably not

As previously mentioned, all three wanted to emphasize that the tour already has a shot clock—Shotlink. But they actually have a second one as well: the as-needed human shot clock of officials manually timing players who have been put on the clock.

Of course, neither of these are the same as a physical shot clock people/fans can see, and it's understandable that after watching how effective a clock has been in sports like tennis and baseball, and seeing it used in the TGL, that fans would wonder why it can't translate to the tour. As Cox fairly pointed out, however, it's not a fair comparison.

" When you tune in and watch a football game or a baseball game or a hockey match or whatever you call it [Cox is British], it's one arena," he said. "And the focus of the officials is on that puck or ball. In any particular week, we'll have 144 players across 18 different arenas, and we're trying to capture all that information with as many as 12, 13, 14 balls in motion at any one point in time."

In short, having a physical shot clock monitoring every player at every part of the course, in a sport where contingencies often require delays, is unrealistic from almost every logistical angle.

However, Schroder said the tour has talked about experimenting with an actual shot clock on the tees at Korn Ferry Tour events. It would be purely used as an experiment, with no penalties attached, and he emphasized the complexities even in running that one test. And when asked him what he thought the most impactful changes would be in the long run, he did not mention the prospect of a test phase shot clock.

Solution 7: A new era of video monitoring

The tour has continued to make investments in a video review center at its headquarters and on-site at venues, and already, the officials in those facilities can give a heads-up to on-course officials when a potential ruling is imminent, which gives them a head start in reaching that part of the course and leads to faster review times and, in theory, better speed of play.

It's not hard to imagine other uses for a comprehensive video review. Let's say Shotlink notifies officials that a player took three minutes over an approach shot in the fairway. With instant video replay, an official could check for extenuating circumstances—was the player attacked by bees?—and if none exist, assess a penalty within the round itself. It could also allow officials to monitor slow players virtually, tracking more groups and players with real-time data.

As with many of these potential changes, the players would have to approve a concept like video review penalties before they could be implemented. There are obstacles to this, and one that often goes unspoken is the idea that the tour is loath to push punitive pace-of-play changes at a time when an aggrieved player can accept big money to play for a rival. To put it mildly, this is not a great time to bring the hammer down. Changes like the reduced fields tend to benefit or be neutral for the best players, which is why the tour could get it through the PAC without worrying out defections; publishing pace statistics or implementing sterner penalties might not be so safe.

Still, it feels like the cavalry is coming—the change in field sizes will have an obvious salutary effect, and when it comes to individual speed of play, player remarks on Tuesday showed that there's been a paradigm shift. Justin Thomas, despite admittedly being on the slower half of players, said he supported releasing pace of play stats. Morikawa agreed and couldn't have been more emphatic.

"I think it should be released," Morikawa said. "I don't know why you wouldn't want it to be released. … I think you just have to start stroking guys and giving guys actual penalties. ... I see no issue with it. I think what is there to hide, right? If you're slow, you know you're slow. If you don't know, then there's an issue. To me, there's no issue with letting it out. It's only going to make things better because then you're either going to have a target on you, put a little more pressure and hopefully you pick it up, or you get penalized."

With those kinds of statements from the best players in the world, it's easy to believe that they're not only realizing the problem exists but are also understanding and embracing their own responsibility in working toward a fix. That's the root of any optimism when it comes to slow play—Young, Cox and Schroder know what solutions will work, and they're actively trying to push them ahead, but it's the players who ultimately must give the green light.