"Fairways are much tighter…and this is further evidenced by the fact that Fred Funk -- who is the benchmark for fairways -- is down in accuracy about 6 percent"

Bob Harig catches up with Hank Haney, who makes a long overdue point about Tiger's driving and the accuracy decline of other top players.

And the easy place to look was at Woods' driving accuracy, which had dropped from over 70 percent in 2000 to under 60 percent this year -- with varying degrees of difficulty in hitting fairways during that time.

"Wouldn't it be more relevant to compare Tiger to the other players?'' said Haney, who pointed out that most players have lost accuracy over the past five years.

Among the reasons Haney cites are the fact that players are hitting the ball farther, fairways are tighter, they are using more drivers off the tee in an attempt to overpower courses and they are using drivers with longer shafts (45 inches now, compared to 43).

"Simple geometry says that even a driver that averages one yard farther will miss more fairways,'' he said. "And Tiger is much longer" -- 293.3 yards in 2002 versus 302.4 yards in 2007 -- "than he was.

"Fairways are much tighter … and this is further evidenced by the fact that Fred Funk -- who is the benchmark for fairways -- is down in accuracy about 6 percent, despite the fact that he has lost distance since 2002.''

Remember, those in favor of grooves regulation suggest these guys thump away at the ball because they have grooves, yet have never mentioned that the decrease in accuracy could also be influenced by narrowing fairway widths.