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On January 8, a video from the PGA Tour came across my social feeds. The topic was driving distance: how it has changed over time and what to make of it.
By the time I finished watching the video, my jaw was on the floor. Had the tour realized what they had admitted to?
The video was co-produced by the tour and SportsBall, a weekly newsletter that uses hand-sketched and animated data visualizations to bring sports statistics and trends to life.
Using appealing time-lapse editing, SportsBall charts the increase in average driving distance on the PGA Tour since 1985. That year, the average was 260 yards. In 2025, that average was 303 yards - a 43-yard increase.
Why the four-club jump in tee shots? The video explains that distance had remained flat until the mid-1990s, when it jumped significantly every year, from 259.4 yards in 1993 to 288.4 yards in 2005 (meaning the overall 43-yard jump has taken place in just 32 years). "Advances in science and materials started to have a huge impact," says the disembodied narrator, who also notes the adoption of titanium-headed drivers and the introduction of "the multi-layered golf ball," - in other words, the Titleist Pro V1 and its competitors.
The narrator soft-pedals this massive spike in distance by expressing it as a percentage. In broad terms, 11% doesn't sound like much, does it? But it equates to an enormous 28.6-yard increase in just a dozen years. If you woke up tomorrow and were driving the ball nearly 30 yards farther, you would consider it a major miracle, not a minor blip.
The narrator notes another lull period until about 2015, when distance jumped by 13 yards in a decade, from 289.7 yards up to last year's average of 302.8 yards. The cause? Technology once again: "things like improved ball materials, modern club designs, specialized training and launch monitors that give players direct feedback to optimize swing efficiency and their smash factor."
To be fair, this information is nothing new; it can be viewed in the Stats section of PGATour.com. It's the second part of the video that left me speechless.
How the PGA Tour's logic on driving distance supports a golf ball rollback
The narrator transitions between charts by wondering, rhetorically, "whether that extra distance leads to better scoring."
This is where things get weird. The second chart in the video is a scatter-plot of all PGA Tour pros' 2025 average driving distances, correlated with their scoring averages. "What you'll mostly see," the narrator explains, "is a blob with very little relationship between distance and scoring."
Let's consider the implications of that statement. If distance and scoring are not strongly correlated, then what has been the benefit of the entire cohort of PGA Tour golfers driving the ball 40 yards farther than they used to? If Player A, a 320-yard driver, and Player B, a 290-yard driver, are relatively equal in scoring ability (the video notes that Russell Henley, one of the shortest hitters on tour, had a top-5 scoring average in 2025), then they would also be relatively equal in scoring ability if they drove the ball, say, 300 yards and 270 yards, respectively. Following the tour's logic from there, presumably Player A's 320-yard self and his 300-yard self could compete well with each other, too. So if the current spread of driving distances permits a level playing field, then sliding everyone down a few yards - which is what the new golf ball regulations coming in 2028 seek to do - will have no ill effect.
In other words, the PGA Tour implies in the video that distance-creep is a classic zero-sum game. If everyone is now 40 yards longer off the tee, then no one is actually better off. The essence of the competition between them has not changed. They're just playing with bigger, more expensive toys today.
What has changed, however, is how those toys distort the playing fields, most of which lack the resources to expand or make wholesale changes to suit the smallest fraction of golfers. Distance-driven stresses on great championship golf courses are too obvious and too well-documented to rehash here.
Stubbornly, the video doubles down on a tired, tone-deaf position by putting 100% of the responsibility for adapting to the changing equipment on the golf courses themselves. "Repositioning bunkers or growing rough in key landing areas can create real consequences for missing the preferred line, increasing the importance of precision over power," says the narrator.
This continues to be an insulting, victim-blaming argument. Absolving the multi-billion-dollar equipment companies of all responsibility for the problem that their admittedly impressive R&D capabilities have created is wrong. Forcing golf courses to take on the entire expense of solving that problem is galling. Demanding that courses reinvent themselves without asking the best golfers in the world to adapt is preposterous. So is the "the horse is out of the barn" excuse: using past USGA and R&A regimes' inaction on equipment to deny them an opportunity to correct things now, especially when, following the PGA Tour's own logic, reining in driving distance would not adversely affect competitive golf.
Having implicitly admitted that regulating driving distance would not hurt competition, the PGA Tour faces an unprecedented leadership opportunity at a time when it has both new management and a fresh mandate to operate differently going forward. Putting aside its past complaints about the governing bodies' earnest efforts to safeguard the game's future with an eye towards scarce land, water and other resources would send a powerful signal about its own ability to think long-term, not just towards short-range profit. It would also put an organization long intent on elevating its flagship event to major championship status in line with the organizers of the Masters, the U.S. Open and the Open Championship, who all support equipment regulation. Slightly shorter driving distances would ease setup pressure, including via course yardages, helping speed up play and actually improving the "product" of pro golf. It would be a huge win for all involved.
Here's hoping the tour decides to do right by its golf courses. Amid all the future uncertainty currently surrounding the professional game, that would be a change worth celebrating.
