This tour reveals its slowest (and fastest) experts. Here’s what you learn

The speed at which Dylan Menante plays golf seems worthy of a discussion of speed of play.

“I’ve always been too fast,” he said one day.

So fast as a junior in Nevada, he played so fast that his father had to step in and slow him down. The fastest in college, when opponents purposefully paired him with one of the hardest-drinking players as a form of psychological warfare. Fastest on the Korn Ferry Tour, and now has the hard data to prove it. Last month, the PGA Tour’s feed circuit became the first major tour to publish “speed of play” times.

Ask around KFT and everyone is talking about Menante’s speed. (Do the same on the PGA Tour, and they talk about Ludwig Aberg.) Off the tee, Menante is hitting shots 16 seconds faster than the KFT average. On approach shots to and from the green, you’re 14 seconds faster. Putting is where he slows down, grinding out an ice speed of 9.62 seconds Immediately than the KFT ratio. A man cooks himself around the golf course.

The only problem is that for every Dylan Menante – a real outlier in the distribution curve as you can see below – there is a mill on the other side. And for every player who is moderately faster than average, there are others who are moderately, or significantly, slower. Not many, but enough that the PGA Tour wants to do something about it.

“It’s a very small percentage that each week seems to improve their speed of play,” said Jordan Harris, KFT’s senior referee. “And that’s going to be an interesting sign, in my opinion, of how this all works. After it’s been deployed for a while, those guys — how do they change their behavior?”

Generating the dataset is simple in theory but relies on tournament volunteers accompanying the teams and managing the scores. Volunteers carry a phone to them, using an app that tells them about the trigger. When players are standing over a shot, volunteers place their thumb on the screen, holding it in place until it is touched, at which point they release their thumb. The clock is always ticking … for everyone. If Player 1 plays a shot, that shot is time-stamped to the second. Once Player 2 connects with him, that shot is also time-stamped. Although the time between these time stamps includes innocent gray areas – such as, waiting for Player 1’s ball to sit, or waiting for the caddy to silence the fans – these time stamps usually inform everything. If you are a slow player, you will stand out.

KFT rules officials can use the same app to track time stamps during the course in real time. But all players’ stamps are added together to show how quickly (on average) they are ready to play after the player in front of them. They are also divided by type of shot: off the tee, approach, around the green and putting. The system isn’t perfect — the first player to play isn’t timed, a problem the Tour is trying to solve — but it has produced a dataset similar to what officials (and even players) believe they’re dealing with week in and week out.

“Each week, we look at the list and it confirms what we see with our eyes,” said Harris. “We don’t see strange things.”

Harris jokes that he has become KFT’s “Pace of Play Guy,” and he describes the program well. You should, because you are tasked with telling the players when they draw. You know how bad this outdoor game played on hundreds of acres can be. For example, what happens if there is a decision that needs to be reversed? Those times are thrown out. 10 percent slower times are also imposed on each player each week. Players in contention always play slower, Harris explained, adding that most KFT winners in recent years have finished with the infraction of “stroke time” — playing their shots seven seconds slower than the field. Is he the only recent winner who didn’t? Yes, Dylan Menante.

Menante is, in some ways, a treasure trove of data. KFT wants to make good news about the speed of its players, and he is a good example. But the other three goals revolve around helping (or correcting) slow gains. KFT wants to (1) Give fans a better context, (2) Support members who have been wrongly labeled as slow, and (3) Let the turtles know it’s time to pick them up. This is where things can get tricky.

“If you ask the Korn Ferry guys, ‘Is speed of play a problem?’, I bet 80% of them say, ‘Yes,'” said KFT expert Cole Sherwood. “But if you ask them, ‘How do we fix it?’, I think people just write blanks because it’s not one thing in particular.”

Sherwood is on the slow side of the ranking, 113 out of 137, 3.45 seconds slower than average, or about 20 seconds slower than Menante. Sherwood is not overly snobbish in any one category; a little lazy on the board. But never get to the point where it becomes a problem. When he looked at the data, one big theme emerged.

“If you look within 50%, remove the outliers,” he said, “maybe a difference of seven seconds.”

Not even! The middle 50% – players 34 to 103 – were separated by about a five second difference in every shot. KFT officials feel very good about that group. They are most concerned about the slowest 10 to 15 players. Each week, the data is shared, and any players who take seven or more seconds to play than the field average receive an “Average Stroke Time Violation.” If a given player gets five of those violations, KFT steps in with a simple message.

“Hey, we don’t want you to pay to play golf, do we?,” Harris said. Translation: For 10 violations, players receive a $50,000 fine. For their 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th violations, it’s $5,000 each week. And beyond that, $10,000 more for each violation. It’s a system that only punishes players if they consistently play woefully slow and don’t change too much about their gameplay too quickly.

As always, it’s an easy topic to fool. There are no shot clocks on the fairway. Or buzzers like you’ll find in TGL. Sherwood played with Ian Gilligan recently, who is ranked as the second slowest player in the KFT this year and is no doubt working towards a season-long fine. But…

“There was never a time when I thought he was slow,” Sherwood said. “It never crossed my mind.”

Sherwood slightly acknowledges golf’s fate as a minor slogan; he doesn’t see a solution like baseball enjoyed with the introduction of the pitch clock. But as baseball does with its minor leagues, so does the PGA Tour I’m trying using KFT to create change. Harris is quick to point out how it took him more than a decade for pitch clocks to graduate from baseball’s feeder leagues to the majors. He saw enough of the data that he thought it would be a good thing for the PGA Tour to use as well. (The PGA Tour has said it wants to, but hasn’t yet.)

And what about our speed demon?

“It seems like on the big tour it’s a big problem,” Menante said. “And I think it’s more and more coming out where the boys are being filmed by the fans Oh you took a minute and 20 seconds to hit the six footer. Like, come on.

“It’s got to be quick. I think on our tour, they’re doing a really good job. I hope it goes up on the PGA Tour just because accountability is important. Everybody has to play a role. There shouldn’t be any wrongdoing.”