Bryson Says The Data Will Prove He's Not The Slowest By Any Means, So Why Can't We See It?

At the risk of sounding old, I wrote back in 2010 about the PGA Tour’s slow play data and what a wonderful opportunity it would be to sign up a sponsor and reward the tour’s fastest players. Nine years later we’re still hiding the data on PGA Tour’s equivalent of the codeword servers to protect repeat offenders.

Maybe with Bryson DeChambeau blowing the whistle on this hidden data that could easily make for one really fun bonus pool, we’ll get some of the numbers published. Shoot, we’ll take the top 75 and let people with no lives try to figure out who the bottom 75 are in pace of play.

Here’s DeChambeau, now (maybe somewhat slightly kinda unfairly) branded as the poster child from Saturday at the Safeway Classic:

“There’s data out there now that shows that I am not the slowest player at all by any means,” he said.

When asked to elaborate on the data he was referring to, DeChambeau was less than forthcoming.

“Well the PGA Tour has it. I’ve seen it. I don’t know if I can disclose any of it,” he said. “But I’m definitely not in the top 10 percent. I’m not close to that. That’s from Shotlink data. We have that. So, I can say that, I know I can say that without a shadow of a doubt.”

Well, not a shadow of a doubt until we see the full list. But the point is, the PGA Tour has the data, knows who the fastest and slowest players are, and just doesn’t want to share.

And maybe they are right to keep things private given the crueler world we live in now compared to 2010. Twitter and the discourse has become coarser.

Still, a points race focused on the fastest players and a sponsor wanting to be associated with efficiency and speed sounds a lot more interesting than the FedExCup.