2 Months after Rory McIlroy’s radical solution to pace of play, PGA Tour issues change of rules

Almost two months ago, Rory McIlroy was one of many golfers proposing rule changes to address the growing pace of play issue. Now, the PGA Tour is finally doing something about it by introducing a revised Pace of Play policy on Wednesday. With slow play affecting so many tournaments, everyone, including the Irishman, had a take.

On March 26, the league announced a revision to the pace of play rules. All "bad time" issues, which the Tour defines as "exceeding the applicable time to play a stroke while being timed," will be penalized in varying degrees.

A first "bad time" will now cost the golfer one stroke. This was previously only the penalty when a second infraction occurred. A second issue will now result in a two-stroke penalty, and a third will get the golfer disqualified.

Each player will have 40 seconds to play. An extra 10 seconds can be applied as long as the golfer is:

• The first player to play on a par-three
• The first player to play a second stroke on a par-four or par-five hole
• The first player to play a third stroke on a par-five hole
• The first player to play near the green
• The first player to play on the green

Groups that struggle or begin to lag behind will be given an official warning by the rules committee before players are hit with penalties. After this, they will monitor to see if individual players or the entire group need to be aggressively timed from there on out.

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What did Rory McIlroy want to do about pace of play?

The PGA Tour has finally adopted some slow-play penalties and a plan to enforce them more strictly. This comes almost two full months after Rory McIlroy voiced his opinion on the matter.

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However, his take isn't what the PGA Tour did. Rory McIlroy said via Bunkered at the end of January:

“There’s a lot of different answers, but not every answer is going to make everyone happy. I could say smaller fields. Smaller fields, smaller fields would help pace of play, but that takes away playing opportunities from people and that’s going to p*** some people off.”

The PGA Tour is going to shrink field sizes in 2026, but in the meantime, they've adopted a more aggressive approach. Rory McIlroy added:

“The other thing is when we play in this time of the year, the tee times have to be a little bit tighter together so that they can get everyone through with daylight and everything. If you could be able to space the tee times out a little bit more, that would hopefully make things flow a little bit better.”

Rory McIlroy is not a player who has had issues playing with urgency and pace during his golf career.