It was only a matter of time before the Champions Tour would have multiple players averaging 300 yards on their drives, but I am surprised it hasn’t happened sooner.

Oh, that’s right – it would have happened years ago, if the players back then had what the current players have, so we all know that Golf Digest is just trying to hype the stats, because hype’s all it is.

A simple glance at some stats is all it takes to confirm this.

The lead-in paragraph, which I had to re-read after checking those stats, goes thusly in the article by Alan Bastable:

Absolutely sending it’: 300-yard bombers have officially arrived on senior tour

Four players in the PGA Tour’s 50-and-over league (aka the PGA Tour Champions) are averaging 300 yards or longer off the tee this season: Stewart Cink, Padraig Harrington, Brendan Jones and Cameron Percy.

That might not sound like a lot of players given the average driving distance for all of the PGA Tour is 303.7 yards, but relatively-speaking, it is. Consider that before 2023, the Champions tour never had had more than one player crack 300 yards for the season — and, in most seasons, none. The overall Champions tour driving distance, no surprise, is also on the rise.

So, a little bait and switch here – announcing the arrival of 300 yard bombers, when they’ve already been there (and I’ll tell you why the stats don’t matter), and for years.

First, that second highlighted sentence in the above paragraph – I know that most of you have already heard or read the phrase, “A rising tide lifts all boats…”

The yardage is increasing across the board (a 12 yard increase in Tour average between 2013-2025), so that tells you that it’s not so much the incredible athletic ability of the new seniors – it’s the equipment doing the heavy lifting, and provably so.

If you look at the driving leaders the last two decades for the Champions Tour on Golf Compendium:

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… you’ll see that this is all hype – Dan Pohl averaged 300 yards all the way back in 2005 – so in 20 years, you have had an increase of less than ten yards in the season’s leading drive stats.

No, there haven’t been multiple 300 yard drivers on average until now, but come on, people – what do you think the increase in average drives has to do with in the 20 years between 2005 and now?

You’re telling me that the equipment has nothing to do with it?  That the equipment and increased knowledge of ideal launch conditions haven’t done practically all of the work here?

I would place a bet, if I could, that if you gave the players of 2005-era Champions Tour today’s equipment and golf course agronomy (and access to the same launch monitor technology), you would have had multiple 300 yard drivers literally from that point.

Not only that – look at the golf swings of those players from 2005 and you’ll see that they were much more mechanically-sound than what they are now.

And yet, distances keep increasing (as do the injuries, but we won’t talk about that right now), just as performance in any sport by any metric has increased.

I mean, Stewart Cink driving it over 300 yards on average in his 50’s when you can simply look his distances up from 15 years ago:

2025 – 305 yards

2010 – 292 yards

Or look at it this way – Stewart Cink at 52 is driving it 305 yards when he was driving it 285 yards at age 32, in his physical prime.  That’s a 20 yard increase.

Not only that, Cink’s averages were dropping from 2010 and had been dropping for a couple of years as he got older – then all of a sudden, his averages began to rise in 2012 and have steadily increased – as he has steadily gotten older – until he’s over 300 now – in his fifties.

Laughable hype, when it’s the equipment and better swing metric analyses that have given him those increases.

The only surprising thing to me about all of this is that they weren’t doing it long before now.

It was really only a matter of time.

And that, friends, is because of the equipment in use.

Ask someone – if it isn’t, why is there such a life-and-death battle by the players and industry to prevent the rolling back of said equipment?

If one’s answer is anything but, “because distances and accuracy will decrease if you do this,” then one really hasn’t been paying attention.