Course Preview and Fits: World Wide Technology Championship

The PGA heads to Mexico this week for its yearly resort-course romp. As you may know, Greg Norman and the LIV Evil Empire stole Mayakoba as a host course this year, and so for the first time in this event’s history, it will depart the confines of El Camaleon and decamp to Cabo, where Tiger Woods’ first course design, El Cardonal, will make its debut on the PGA Tour. Exciting stuff! While we had a ton of data on Mayakoba, though, we have nothing on El Cardonal, so this will be a pretty short and speculative article. We still have course fit, and it’s a course with a pretty clear profile, so there’s still something to be gleaned from a spin around the course.

At Par 72 and just over 7,400 yards, El Cardonal is on the longer side of courses, and profiles as a place where bombers will be able to let loose with driver on most holes. While this is a Tiger design, it was not created with PGA Tour players in mind; this is a resort course, and it’s designed to make rich vacationers feel good about their game and not lose too many balls. So while it looks to be in pristine shape, don’t expect it to pose too much of a challenge for the players this week. Accuracy is basically irrelevant this week, as the fairways are miles wide, and there’s no real rough to speak of. While not quite as extreme as St Andrews, that’s definitely the vibe here, albeit a more tropical version. It will be truly hard for players to miss these fairways, so it will be more about creating the right angle into the green. Expect guys to push it down there as far as they can and have a lot of short-/mid-distance approaches into the greens.