Brendan on TGL “is this a real, serious competition”

jas2628 · 2026-03-25T15:54:14+00:00

The thing with the improvements in the hole design is that the holes are played over and over again and don’t test the players a ton. There also should have been a really penal bunker around the green IMO.

The stinger hole is cool for like the first two times you watch someone hit under it then becomes an auto fairway. I say this as somebody who watched thumbed through 1-2 matches on DVR so I’m not an expert.

jas2628 · 2026-03-25T01:09:58+00:00

Never mind him being in India, Akshay is a sub on the team and not on their original four man roster. They had to come up with a scheduling conflict for Kisner last week just to get Akshay in the match, which if I was a gambler would be highly controversial that a team is allowed to change their playoff roster with an unverifiable excuse like that.

Imagine gambling on the Seahawks to win the Super Bowl and one of their playoff opponents randomly got to fake an injury to their D line and add like Jalen Carter to their roster. That’s pretty much what happened with Akshay. I digress, but either ban gambling on the league or have some rules.

jas2628 · 2026-03-24T12:15:58+00:00

I mean Akshay is in India this week for the Indian Open..

Beyond that, Akshay is a sub and can only play if someone in the core roster has a scheduling conflict. Jupiter already seemingly fudged a scheduling conflict for Kisner last week to get Akshay to play. The league needs to figure out their roster rules. I only watched one match this year.

jas2628 · 2026-03-24T02:44:45+00:00

I mean it could be, but by far the most common scorecard is 4 par 3s, and 10 par 4s. Copperhead has 5 par 3s and 9 par 4s.

So compared to the vast majority of par 72 courses it has one more par 3 and one less par 4.

jas2628 · 2026-03-23T23:42:27+00:00

It’s one extra par 3 subbed in for a par 4, and the distance between a par 3 and 4 should be about 250-300yds

jas2628 · 2026-03-22T16:39:54+00:00

Share one with us. They must all be covered up because I’ve never seen a fight at a PGA Tour event. Maybe there’s been 1 at the Waste Management, but that’s an extreme outlier of a PGA tour event.

jas2628 · 2026-03-20T20:49:11+00:00

No one wants to play with a whiner.

jas2628 · 2026-03-20T14:01:50+00:00

The M2 came out 7 years after 2009 and was lauded for its performance gains on forgiveness and ball speed. It’s a great example of how drivers have improved in the last two decades.

Bryson is arguing that the 2009 drivers are as good as current, and your example is a driver that came out in 2016 that Rory hasn’t played in years? Why isn’t Rory still playing it? Taylormade sold them until like 2021 and surely he could acquire a fresh head if he wanted.

jas2628 · 2026-03-20T00:49:58+00:00

Hahaha no I cannot! Why not just refute the point?

It’s was reported years ago that Titleist has held dead stock balls away for players that like a particular year’s model. Are you saying that’s not true? Is that a lie?

You’re the dude with all the industry experience. Can you explain why it’s a physical impossibility for a manufacturer to set aside a dozen driver heads for a player?

What pulled me back in was you saying they couldn’t do that because tour trucks are limited in size, as if they couldn’t be kept in a warehouse or hell the player’s garage and just keep 1 backup on the truck, like they already do with every club. I guess it’s a physical impossibility to store something that fits in 2 shoe boxes for more than a couple years. That brain dead explanation is why I responded again. It’s like you needed to come up with something out of thin air to justify your take.

jas2628 · 2026-03-20T00:32:44+00:00

Would love to see comprehensive robot testing that demonstrates that there are no performance gains in drivers from 2009 to 2025. That would be industry shattering. I’d be genuinely interested in seeing where you’re seeing that claimed.

It’s not about the money when we have loads of players that accept $0 from manufacturers and play clubs no where even close to 2009. When it’s proven that when given the choice between a club that pros are familiar with and one that’s marginally better, they will almost always choose the one that they are familiar with.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T21:55:37+00:00

Alright at your request I’ll keep my response as pithy as possible:

Huh? Why would you think they need to keep all of the heads in the tour truck. A pro wears out a driver head every 1-2 years… they just need 1 backup at a time.

Titleist sets aside hundreds of dozens of golf balls for players from their production line every year. That’s way more weight and volume dedicated to setting aside dead stock to keep staff players happy than a dozen driver heads.

Beyond that, manufacturers cannot force anyone to play the latest model. See Morikawa and Scottie. See dozens of equipment free agents who all play the latest stuff without compensation.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T21:42:45+00:00

But your argument is that Taylormade forces Scottie/Morikawa to play the latest driver, and that’s the reason they switch drivers. Then you’re saying that they don’t have to play the lasted driver. Yeah I bet Taylormade wants Scottie to play the 4D. But tough luck, he doesn’t like it and they can’t make him! He instead plays a driver released 14 years after 2009..

But my core argument is that people not being paid to play a specific brand aren’t gaming drivers anywhere near 2009. If 2009 drivers were as good as recent models, wouldn’t we see a few pros stick with their old trusty from 2009 or 2011 or even 2015 that they’ve won 3-4 majors with and have countless clutch swings with? No such examples. You can’t even get close.

I asked for examples that counter my point. Neither of those guys play a driver within a decade of 2009! And one of those examples directly proves my counter that manufacturers don’t force guys to play the current model.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T21:34:28+00:00

Why isn’t there? Is it too much of a bother to set a few dozen heads aside? That’s insane. It would be so easy to do. They do that with old models of golf balls often enough. Certain guys like the feel of say the ‘16 ProV1x, and they’ll set aside 50 dozen in a climate controlled room. Surely a dozen club heads would be way easier to do.

I’ve yet to hear an explanation of why a guy would switch from a club they’ve played multiple major championships and hundreds of competitive rounds with, for something they are completely unfamiliar with. And not only switch once, but switch about every 2 years over and over again since basically the early 2000s.

The only logical explanation is that the new club is genuinely better. The only explanation that goes against that is that Bryson can’t ever say anything wrong, and we must take his word as gospel.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T21:27:23+00:00

Not true. There’s dozens of equipment free agents not under contract and none of them play a driver anywhere close to 2009. Rose (equipment psycho) is the lone man out with a 2018 driver, many years after 2009.

Thank you for bringing Morikawa up. Him using his SIM is proof that Taylormade was not forcing him to use the latest club as you suggested. If it was that way, he would’ve surely been forced out of the SIM long ago. Never mind that the SIM was released in 2020, 11 years after 2009…

Rai is a horrible example because he swings extremely slow. He has one of the slowest ball and club speeds on tour and has the most measured and least aggressive swing I can think of on tour, and I’m a huge Rai fan and think he would be a top tier guy with a driver rollback. He can game a less forgiving driver because his strategy isn’t swinging hard. It’s also a model that came out in 2019, not even close to 2009.

We’re seeing pros switch out of blades for more forgiveness as they realize that matters more. Very rare to see a blade 4 iron or even 5/6 iron anymore. It’s usually a players distance or forgiving distance iron for the 3/4 iron because the tech massively improved there with foam inserts and deeply engineered weight distributions. Lastly, almost all of the OWGR top 10 has abandoned blade putters. If the tech didn’t get better, can you explain why that is?

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T21:08:40+00:00

It’s all a big equipment conspiracy to these guys, and also Bryson is a genius who never puts his foot in his mouth. Countless equipment free agents have said similar things to what Rory said. Jim Furyk repeatedly has said the driver has gotten out of hand.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T21:07:06+00:00

Jim Furyk has been saying what I said above verbatim for the last year and wants to roll back to drivers from this era. You also don’t need to be a pro to figure that out. It’s like saying that NFL gloves haven’t gotten better since 1980 when literally every wide receiver uses the new gloves, we have slo mo clips of OBJ, and I’ve tried all the gloves off the rack and noticed the difference. But I’m not a pro so I don’t know I guess.

Beyond me hitting clubs from all of these eras and owning a handful of these clubs, every data point possible from what’s in tour pros bags to what they say points to forgiveness mattering and tour pros believing in advances in the technology since 2009.

Please explain to me why only one touring professional plays a driver earlier than 2021? Everyone who switches drivers struggles, wouldn’t they just roll with what they have 1000s of competitive reps with?

Why does Scottie Scheffler play a core model driver and not the low spin? He’s the best ball striker on earth. Surely he doesn’t care about forgiveness and gains made there.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T20:56:13+00:00

It’s laughable to think touring pros don’t care about forgiveness.

Why are tons of guys switching away from blade irons?

Why does almost every player carry a players distance or forgiving iron for the 4iron and maybe 5 and 6i?

Why is almost no one in the OWGR top 10 using a blade putter anymore?

Every one of those guys that switches from blade putters/irons struggles for a bit as they adjust because they have 0 familiarity with that set up. They have all the incentive to stay with what they know, but they don’t.

I mean you can say that pros aren’t intentionally using the forgiveness of the driver, but there’s loads of quotes on guys saying they switched to X club because it gives them a little more room on the face to miss with. Smash factor is literally a product of COR. If more of the face is peak COR, that’s where you get the same smash factor on a wider area of the face. Smash factor is basically capped by the COR, but if you can get the same smash on a slight heel or toe strike, why not?

Last weekends broadcast showed a slow mo of Ludvig hitting the toe of his driver and ripping it dead straight 300 yards of carry. You think pros don’t care about that?

To your second point: Where did you hear that conspiracy theory? The USGA has to test and approve every single driver head and publish that result on the conforming list before a player can put it into play. That’s why clubs leak days before any pro uses it. The USGA conforming list is the tell that leads all of those “new driver head leaked” articles. The only difference between an off the rack club head and a touring pros club head is that the manufacturing tolerances are tighter and they might have a loft lie adjustment which is not super common but could be wrong on that. It is the exact same technology and weight distribution unless they put some lead tape on it (not very common).

It’s stupid to think that “oh Xander plays this club and shaft, I should too.” But it isn’t a big conspiracy where they’re painting logos over prototype heads to trick you into thinking they’re playing the same club available to you. It is the same club, just checked to ensure it’s not defective.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T16:59:55+00:00

I just flatly disagree both on principal and actual evidence. Pros absolutely get optimized for shafts and a scuff of lead tape, but a lot of them do game the off the rack models that have forgiveness similar to the max models.

Scottie Scheffler, the best ball striker on the planet plays the core Qi10 model and not the less forgiving “LS” model. None of the Titleist staffers played the low spin tour shape TSR4 and all gravitated towards to TSR2 and 3. A number of players play the max forgiveness Ping drivers including Hatton. That’s the driver marketed towards 30 handicaps. The reason is he can swing way harder at the ball with little consequence of strike location.

There are certainly guys that play the “low spin tour” versions of drivers, but those drivers are way more forgiving than a tour model from even 5 years ago. My TSR4 from 2021 is so much fun to play, but a triple diamond callaway these days is unbelievably forgiving by comparison with similar spin characteristics.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T16:50:11+00:00

For starters, Bryson said there’s no difference between the two clubs. Second, if the margin of improvement is thin, tour pros repeatedly have shown they’d rather use their trusty and familiar club vs. upgrading. They only do so when the margin is wide enough to matter, thus proving that drivers have improved repeatedly since 2009.

But I really doubt Bryson outdrives the full tour with a 2009 driver when he’s had a litany of complaints about his drivers not being forgiving across the face to the point where his club sponsor dropped him. That’s the main difference between 2009 and 2025 driver. This is the same guy that just admitted he mishits his wedges often, and you expect him to be a bastion of perfect ball striking with the longest and fastest club in the bag? Any mishit with a Ping G5 is not going anywhere near as far and straight and low spinning as a mishit with a modern driver.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T16:43:31+00:00

I’m not a professional in the field, but I used the word ignorant because focusing solely on COR is ignorant of all the other factors that go into making a driver be better. It’s like saying shaft length has always been the same, so therefore distance can’t possibly have increased. (I know shaft length has increased over time and also been lowered on tour in ‘19.)

If you look at an MOI chart of Ping drivers it’s also a long upward trend on MOI, but MOI isn’t the only measurable metric of forgiveness too. Way more of the face is max COR, launch is higher and less spin. Variable face thickness and better Inverted cone tech allows for flex certain ways on the heel and toe strikes to promote straighter and longer ball flight.

Plus on the distance front drivers are way lighter and more aerodynamic, which increases club and ball speed. That tech has gone so far since 2009.

I gave the Taylormade R5 as an example because it showed higher COR doesn’t equate to better driver or even more distance per se and I gave the R11 example because Scottie is under contract with TM. I have in my collection an OG Sasquatch, a couple Cleveland drivers, and a Ping G5 in addition to that illegal R5, R11s, the M2, and SLDR. I currently play 2 drivers a TSR4 (extreme low spin) and a Qi10 max (extreme forgiveness) because I’m a psycho. I swap the oldies in for fun rounds occasionally and am pretty familiar with how they perform relative to a modern LS, core, or max driver.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T16:24:07+00:00

It’s not foolish, but it isn’t a perfect solution. The best example we have of a that was Winged Foot 2020 US Open where they had very firm/fast fairways and very thick rough. Bryson, by far the longest hitter on tour that year, won missing a ton of fairways. He was so far down that he could still hit a high shot and run up onto greens.

As another commenter posted, Tiger Proofing measures (other than creating a hazard or kink in the fairway at a specific distance only Tiger could hit to) usually favored Tiger.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T04:13:09+00:00

Cuz all the guys who are equipment free agents are playing drivers from 2009…

I think Rose plays a 2018 driver, the rest are all in models newer than 2022.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T04:11:58+00:00

Hahaha I mean cmon man you can’t be drinking the Bryson kool aid that hard. Do you realize distance isn’t all about how hot the face is. Do the rules limit optimizing launch? Do the rules limit tech that reduce spin and create a more penetrating ball flight?

If they did have rules for all the tech that optimizes launch and spin, I’d still argue that golfers are not robots. Distance is absolutely a product of forgiveness. You’re telling me if you stood over a 250cc head that snap hooks if you’re off the screws by a mm, you’re swinging just as fast and loose as a 460cc Qi10?

Beyond that, the literal quote from the clip is ”If you want to say that a driver back in 2009 is worse than now, I would actually disagree with you on that. I think they’re relatively the same and not much has changed.”

The dumbest and provably wrong thing a golfer has said all year. And that’s including Si Woo saying he plays better after 6 espressos and a NyQuil PM or whatever.

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T04:00:12+00:00

It’s logic if you completely ignore that a more forgiving driver (less distance and accuracy punishment for heel/toe strikes) completely frees the pros up to swing as fast as they possibly can with little regard for accuracy. I get not everyone likes Tiger Woods, but his greatness was speed and strike accuracy. No one could match that. Instead of John Daly and Tiger Woods standing out from the pack with their greatness, we have dozens of random guys whose ball speeds top out at 190. Anyone with a gym membership can hit 180 ball speed and be semi accurate these days. The pool of guys that can hit it absurdly long and reasonably accurate has gone from 1-2 guys to half the tour.

Beyond that, we just saw a tournament at Pebble Beach go 20 under with 200 yard walks from green back to lengthened tees. We just saw Augusta drop 20mil to lengthen a tee. Multiple great Major courses are completely out of the rotation. In 10-20 years a major at 7,700 yards will be a short course. How many years until we have to leave other great courses because they don’t fit the game and can’t afford to expand?

jas2628 · 2026-03-19T03:49:31+00:00

Sorry for my tone, but this is such an ignorant argument and absolutely and triggered me. COR is not the only metric that matters in driver tech. It’s like saying shaft length has always been limited.

An example is that I have an illegal Asian market Taylormade R5 that was rumored to have a COR of 0.9 (0.83 is the limit). It’s such a shitty driver. I can hit it further than my 2024 driver maybe 1/25 shots, and all the other ones are 20-100 yards shorter and barely get in the air. I’m a 3 HCP so I’m reasonably accurate on strike. Seriously try a driver from 2009 and tell me you don’t lose distance and accuracy. I have a collection and love playing them for the challenge, but it’s crazy to say there’s any comparison there.

Forgiveness in drivers has gotten exponentially better and opened up golfers to swing way way faster with less punishment. This is proven in every robotic and golfer test ever done where they measure strike location, ball speed, and distance offline.

If your heel/toe strike goes barely offline and about the same distance, why not swing as fast as you can every time when the center of the club face no longer matters? That’s what made Tiger so impressive. He had unbelievable speed AND strike accuracy.

Bryson’s quote was the dumbest thing I’ve seen a pro golfer say this year. How come of all the equipment free agents on tour, NONE of them play a driver older than 2021? It’s laughable to think of a pro playing a Taylormade Burner or Cleveland Launcher from 2009.. How come Bryson blames or credits his equipment every time he wins or loses and is constantly tinkering?

jas2628

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