PGA Tour feature Rapid Rounds grade, review and takeaway

The PGA Tour unveiled a new level of technology (so to speak) this week and the 3M Open served as the guinea pig.

Ahead of this week’s tournament the Tour announced a new function in partnership with their broadcast partners – Rapid Rounds. The idea behind this is that the Tour will work with their broadcast partners, obviously the one broadcasting a tournament at any given moment, to put together miniature versions of rounds for players who were notable at that moment in time. Consider it a real-life TL;DR in the golf world.

The function is accessible under the “Watch & Listen” tab on the Tour’s website and looks like this. For what it’s worth you can also access this from a phone or tablet within the PGA Tour app.

As you can see there is a tab to cycle through tournaments where the goal is clearly to be able to move to and from different ones. While the Tour announced this ahead of the 3M Open it is worth noting that the Genesis Scottish Open and ISCO Championship were both options that you could select when I was browsing.

You have to watch a brief ad before things begin playing, but then a card shows up for the player you selected. I chose Max Homa to test things out and the title card told me this was the first round, that Homa finished T6 and that he was 5-under on the round. It also noted he was 5-under total, but obviously that was the case with only one round in the book and will look different after future rounds.

This particular ‘Rapid Round’ was 13:38 and included Homa’s entire Thursday round for full context. Obviously the in between of things was cut out and the footage focused on the actual golf shots that Max hit across the day.

Sign me up for this kind of thing week in and week out. It feels very much like the technology that we see every year from the Masters and the ability to be able to watch the full round from specific players is something that fans have been asking for forever now. In a perfect world you would be able to see each and every player’s full round, not just the ones chosen or isolated by the powers that be, but this is a significant leap forward.

It will be interesting to see what this looks like over the weekends as footage comes from the Tour’s broadcast partners and not their in-house production. Ultimately this is an awesome development and the future of it is very exciting.