Is there a tradeoff when chasing distance with your irons? We put 30 of them on the swing robot to find out

Most golfers call it "loft-jacking," and depending on whom you ask, it's become an epidemic in the iron category. In search of more distance through the bag, many equipment manufacturers have strengthened iron lofts across the board in the players-distance, game-improvement and super-game-improvement categories.

If the competition is going to chase distance, then it seems silly to get left behind. A 7-iron with 29 degrees of loft is trotted out, which is basically a 6-iron from a decade ago. This sets off the "loft-jacking" crowd who believes the number stamped on each sole is meaningless.

To be clear, we're not here to judge. If you want to chase distance, opting for an iron featuring low launch and spin properties is the simplest play. The obvious question is what you're giving up when the lofts get stronger.

One key attribute is consistency. If a manufacturer is chasing distance through lower lofts, something has to give when contact isn't perfect. It's similar to what we've seen from low-spin drivers, where a forward center of gravity generally leads to more distance but punishes mishits. (We've seen a few drivers buck this trend in recent years, so the days of trading off-center performance for speed could be coming to an end.)

Going stronger also leads to questions about suboptimal landing angles that can make it difficult to hold greens, even on center strikes.

To determine if there's a tradeoff in distance, dispersion and descent angle when you go stronger, we put 30 current 7-irons—covering players, players-distance, game-improvement and super-game-improvement categories—through testing on the Golf Laboratories swing robot. Stock lofts across the field run from 27 degrees to 34 degrees, a seven-degree spread that covers everything from PXG's 0311XP Gen 8 to Cobra's 3DP MB.

Testing Protocol

All 30 irons were tested on the swing robot at Golf Laboratories with Titleist's Pro V1 golf balls. Each iron struck 36 shots: Six at the mid center, six each at the heel and toe at mid height, and six more at each of those three positions struck a half inch low.

Carry distance, peak height and descent angle were each averaged within their strike zones; dispersion is reported as a 95 percent confidence ellipse, the area within which 95 percent of a club's shots landed.

Stock lofts are manufacturer-published specifications for each model's standard build.

Where's the dispersion penalty?

As mentioned at the outset, there's a belief that stronger lofts lead to an increase in dispersion. But according to the robot's findings, that doesn't appear to be the case.

When loft is compared to the 95 percent ellipse across all 30 irons, there's nothing to see. Statisticians use a 0-to-1 scale to describe how tightly two things move together, where 1 means one number predicts the other almost perfectly and 0 means they're unrelated. Loft and dispersion land at 0.27, close enough to zero to call it within the noise.

The cleanest way to see this has nothing to do with statistics? Cobra's 3DP and PXG's 0311XP Gen 8, which carry the strongest loft in the field at 27 degrees, have a shot pattern that covers 167 square yards (3DP) and 361 square yards (0311XP). If loft alone made a club unwieldy, then two irons built with the same stated loft couldn't land 200 square yards apart from each other.

Peak height doesn't move either

The instinct says a stronger loft has to fly lower. However, it doesn't, at least not in any way you'd notice. Loft and peak height come in at 0.16, another number too small to be a real pattern.

Across the whole field, 7-irons topped out anywhere from 81 to 95 feet in the air, and loft had almost nothing to do with where in that range a given club landed. Whatever engineering keeps a strong-lofted head playable isn't just protecting distance. It's getting the ball up in the air, too.

The distance gain is real

Strengthen loft and carry distance goes up, reliably. The relationship there measures 0.79, about as strong a signal as the robot produced.

A degree less loft leads to real yardage, which is the entire premise the players-distance and game-improvement categories are built on. Up until this point, you're probably wondering if there's a catch somewhere in here, and that's where descent angle comes into play.

The cost of more distance

Descent angle is where loft finally has to answer for something. Check how steeply the ball comes down against loft across the same 30 irons and the number jumps to 0.74, one of the strongest relationships in this whole dataset outside of distance itself.

Look at just the nine game-improvement irons, where loft alone ranges a full four degrees, and the number climbs to 0.93. That's loft, on its own, doing all of the work.

The same two irons that landed 200 square yards apart on dispersion also sit at the bottom of the descent-angle list. Cobra's 3DP King and PXG's 0311XP Gen 8 come in at 43 degrees, the flattest landing angle of any 7-iron tested.

TaylorMade's Qi4D Max HL, four degrees weaker in that same category, produces a 47-degree landing angle. Take a degree of loft off a 7-iron and you net almost exactly a degree of landing angle.

This is important because a ball arriving at 43 degrees with a 7-iron will likely hit the green and release on impact. One arriving at 47 or 48 degrees will no doubt stop closer to where it landed. On a firm green, that could be the difference between a shot that stays and one that runs through the back.

The bottom line

If you're eyeing a stronger-lofted 7-iron for extra yardage, the data says you can stop worrying about two things: Dispersion won't widen, and you won't lose the peak height that plays a role in optimizing distance.

What you're actually signing up for is a flatter descent angle, and how much that matters depends on the conditions at your local course.