The big story in pro golf this month is the emergence of TGL, a simulator league that has garnered positive reviews and encouraging ratings after the first two matches.
One of the reasons the response is so positive? The fast pace.
TGL has the ability to move at an incredible speed as we watch PGA Tour players completing holes in a matter of four or five minutes. While the broadcast takes two hours, the golf itself only needs roughly half of that TV window.
Aside from the obvious fact that it is hybrid simulator golf (short-game shots take place on an actual green complex), the most critical factor for the quick pace of play is a 40-second shot clock.
Players have to pick a strategy, step up to the tee and hit before the buzzer goes off. If they don’t, it’s a penalty.
So far in TGL, players have been lightning-fast to the point where the clock rarely gets under 15 seconds.
This is a complete 180 from typical Tour golf. Yes, that golf is played on an actual course that requires walking and far more effort from a golf perspective—but the average threesome on Tour needs about four hours and 45 minutes to complete 18 holes.
The pace is glacial, which doesn’t help a lackadaisical TV product. Hell, it doesn’t help watching in person, either. The pace is so poor that the Tour had to reduce field size, in part because guys couldn’t finish before sunset and cuts were being made on Saturday mornings instead of Friday evenings.
This begs the question whether TGL has found something with the use of its shot clock.
Should the Tour implement a similar strategy to get players moving quicker?
The case for shot clocks in pro golf
There is, technically, already a “rule” for how much time golfers have to play a shot.
“It is recommended that the player make the stroke in no more than 40 seconds after they are (or should be) able to play without interference or distraction,” according to rule 5.6b in the USGA Rules of Golf.
Based on that recommendation, golfers can be “put on the clock” if their group falls behind pace.
That rarely happens, however. And players almost never receive a penalty for a bad time.
The last instance of a Tour player receiving a slow-play penalty was John Catlin in 2021. Prior to that, it was at the Zurich Classic, a team event, in 2017. Glen Day was given a penalty in 1995. We’re talking once a decade or so. You have to search hard to find a rules official bold enough to dole out a penalty.
There have been fines handed out—but Tour players aren’t too concerned given how shaving one stroke from their score can easily make up for that fine. And pace of play hasn’t improved without real fear that the numbers on their scorecards will be affected.
Guys are playing for so much money that a slap on the wrist isn’t going to help.
“Honestly, I would start stroking guys,” Brooks Koepka said in 2023. “If you are going to take that long, you have to get stroked.”
It’s the only way to speed things up.
While some argue pace-of-play changes would cut off only a maximum of 10 to 15 minutes per round—and that difference wouldn’t be worth any strife involved—the Tour is also desperate to regain viewers as TV ratings have plummeted.
Imagine the intrigue as players come down the stretch of a big tournament and a shot clock is ticking down. Imagine it’s windy and a big decision has to be made as the clock is inside 10 seconds.
Imagine every player having to play every shot within 40 seconds of the time that it is their turn.
Considering that some guys take more than two minutes to hit a shot, the change of atmosphere would be dramatic.
Every other sport has some time constraints. A part of the skill of the game is being able to make decisions and execute within that time frame.
If quarterbacks had two minutes to figure out the defense, football would be fundamentally changed. If would be easier to detect what coverage a defense is playing. Procedural penalties like delay of game would never happen. It would negatively change the chemistry of how the game works.
Look at baseball. Since introducing a pitch clock, the number of 3 1/2-hour games has gone from 391 in 2021 to seven in 2024. Games are down 27 minutes on average. Playoff baseball last year had a five-percent increase in TV ratings and viewership for the season as a whole was up 11 percent.
Tennis is also among the games to get quicker by implementing a shot clock.
People like fast! Golf getting faster would be more interesting to watch … and it would be less of a time commitment for viewers.
The purists will cringe but professional golf needs to get more entertaining to attract viewers. It’s a big shake-up—but it’s also just enforcing a rule that already exists.
Golfers will adapt and I highly doubt anyone would suffer too much from it.
The case against shot clocks in golf
You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?
Philosophically, shot clocks make a lot of sense.
Practically, there are a few issues that make shot clocks unlikely.
First, we run into the same issue we had with the signing of the scorecard dilemma. Every player has to be competing under the same rules—whether that is the first group on Thursday at the Barracuda Championship or the final pairing on Sunday at the Masters.
Would there be a rules official with every group for every tournament?
Currently, a normal Tour event has somewhere around nine to 12 officials. There would need to be way more officials on site for a shot clock system to work.
Any “official scorer” roles where a volunteer or someone else times each player would not be feasible. There can’t be random, unpaid people deciding when to start the clock—and only about half of all golf shots are televised during most events so replays wouldn’t be reliable.
Another issue: Other sports have visible shot clocks the players can see which is kind of important. So how would a golfer see a shot clock?
You would need a rules official riding with every single group, timing every single player—and the clock would have to be visible for each shot.
It’s doable if the Tour really wanted to do it but it would be an investment and a major culture shift. The Tour is not exactly known for being innovative.
There are other problems like how timing would be kept when there is a ruling. Would players get timeouts or extensions?
Beyond infrastructure issues—which could theoretically be addressed by training and paying more officials—perhaps the best argument against shot clocks is that pro golf tours could just … enforce the rules?
The Tour could identify slow groups, like it already does, and be stricter with assessing penalties. Just that fear would speed up the game.
However, the entertaining element of a shot clock is that fans can see it. There would be drama to whether a golfer gets a shot off in time. You don’t really get that with a rules official holding a stop watch.
The European Tour tried a “Shot Clock Masters” event in 2018 where rules officials rode in carts with large screens showing the time remaining. Each player was given two time extensions per round. Pace of play fell about 30 minutes and scores were actually lower than usual. There were only four penalties given out the whole tournament as players were on their best behavior.
Unfortunately the sponsor for that event didn’t sign on again and the European Tour never revisited the concept. The man behind it was then-CEO Keith Pelley—known for radical ideas—who now is out of the golf industry.
Nobody has had the cojones or desire to try it since then—until TGL came around.
We can dare to dream
Sports adapt. If golf keeps going down a path where fewer and fewer fans are paying attention, it might be time for drastic measures.
Perhaps some will laugh at the possibility of a shot clock in a game like golf—but it’s not as farfetched as you might think.
As far as I’m concerned, everything is on the table for making the game of golf more enjoyable as a TV product. Golf broadcasts do have the luxury of switching from player to player when rounds are slow but viewers are still affected by the pace from an overall time investment standpoint.
Even shaving 30 minutes off a round would be significantly beneficial for the product. And the drama around players trying to beat a shot clock would be entertaining in and of itself.
What do you think? Would a shot clock help professional golf? Let me know below in the comments.
Top Photo Caption: The European Tour tried shot clocks during a tournament in 2018. (GETTY IMAGES/Matthew Lewis)
The post Is It Time For Shot Clocks On The PGA Tour? appeared first on MyGolfSpy.
