Every few years the PGA Tour makes minor updates to its pace-of-play policy, often from suggestions of its own player-led pace-of-play committee, working to find improvements for slow play and the narratives that surround it. What’s coming next would be more than “minor”. But first, you’ll see it on the Korn Ferry Tour.
Starting next month, speed-of-play statistics for Korn Ferry Tour players will be made public for the first time, following a decision made by the PGA Tour Policy Board in November. The data for average stroke times has been privately available to individuals throughout 2026, but will now be included among player profiles and stat pages on the Korn Ferry Tour website.
The initiative was communicated in a memo to PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour players this week, and the data will become publicly available following the Colonial Life Charity Classic, played May 14–17. It hinges on the following four “objectives,” which are framed in a particularly player-friendly way. They are listed below, verbatim from the memo shared with members:
- Providing competitive context to fans
- Creating positive storylines and changing the perception around speed of play, which currently skews negative
- Correcting inaccurate information and supporting members who are incorrectly labelled as slow
- Being informative to the slowest players and monitoring any changes to their speed of play
This move shouldn’t come as a massive surprise — the PGA Tour promised it was coming 13 months ago — but it is following a delayed release. It was at the 2025 Players Championship that Jay Monahan declared speed-of-play stats for the PGA Tour would arrive by the end of 2025, saying it was a “point of emphasis” following feedback from the Tour’s Fan Forward initiative. Like many of the changes arriving at the PGA Tour these days, it has taken longer than originally promised to implement, and any impact this data has will likely alter how the PGA Tour eventually publishes data about the best players in the world.
At the time of the 2025 announcement, it was not clear what info would be made public. But now, according to the memo, tournament-specific timings and season average timings will be made available for each player. There will be an overall Speed-of-Play ranking that lists the fastest players at the top, relative to the tour average. Each type of shot will also be categorised. I.e. average stroke times for tee shots will be separated from the same data for approach shots. Individual averages will even be made available during tournaments, offering a level of detail that hasn’t been shared before.
Much of this data is made possible via the Tour’s ShotLink system — the same instrument it uses for keeping highly accurate Strokes Gained statistics (not to mention data funnelled to sportsbooks) — which has only recently arrived in full force on the KFT. It takes an army of vigilant volunteers, but the Tour hopes it can provide context for situations where it has sorely been missing. It should help slower players understand the results of their processes. It should help highlight which players play at an average pace but seem slow when paired with a very fast player. And it should help the PGA Tour decide how to release that data with its upper tier of professionals. It’s just not clear when that will happen.
Much remains in flux for the PGA Tour’s competitive structure moving forward, and speed-of-play data is impacted by those structures. For instance, pace of play becomes extremely important when field sizes grow, and the Tour is still working on determining how many players will be in each field. Regardless, the KFT has long been where rules changes can first be observed at the elite level, much like how Major League Baseball first altered some of its rules at the minor-league level. The KFT, for example, currently allows distance-measuring devices (rangefinders), which is a pace-of-play initiative. Will that reach the PGA Tour level, too? 2026 is an information-gathering period, with that rule in place for the first time.
Also included in the memo were screenshots highlighting just how forward-facing the speed-of-play averages will be. In those images, mocked up for a default player’s profile, the individual’s speed-of-play ranking was situated just beneath his strokes gained data — adjacent to the most important statistic of them all.
This article originated on Golf.com
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