First U.S. Open Question: Would Wider And Firmer Have Been Better?

I've just hit the send button on 1100 words of course setup talk for Golf World and plan to actually eat some food, but after reading the initial reactions to Sunday, it seems a golf course topic is required. While I don't usually like to lean on stats, the numbers were eye opening this year. I'll save the really surprising stuff for my story so that the context isn't skewed, but as I noted in Golf World Monday, players hit 12% fewer fairways this year than in 1998 when Tom Meeks was painting fairway lines. And he wasn't exactly known for his generosity off the tee!

I also really enjoyed reading your kneejerk reactions and it seems that television did a good job conveying the often arbitrary nature of the landing zones.

So the first question is, would wider have made it better U.S. Open? Keep in mind this would have meant more drivers and mostly wedges into par-4s because of how firm the course got (as expected). But also remember that a lot of water was applied to the course to keep the fairways as playable, gulp, they were.

Here's what the USGA's Mike Davis said to this same general question when I asked him Sunday:

I think that if we had let the fairways get real firm then they could have been 50% wider and they would have played more narrow than these have played.