PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- Controversial PGA Tour rulings like the one that surrounded Rory McIlroy during the opening round of the 2024 Players Championship likely will be a thing of the past moving forward.
Inside the newly opened 165,000-square-foot PGA Tour Studios is a new Video Review Center that will allow tour officials to quickly rule on complex issues rather than some of the long, drawn-out situations of the past.
In last year’s opening round, McIlroy pulled his tee shot into the water on the Par 4 seventh hole at TPC Sawgrass, but there was a disagreement between he and his playing competitors about where exactly the ball crossed into the hazard. The situation led to a discussion of more than 7 minutes before McIlroy played his next shot.
But in the new Review Center, which works in tandem with the tour’s ShotLink 2.0 system as well as the Hawk-Eye system, the technology that rose to prominence through tennis and has since grown into other sports.
“Right now, we would have that, you would have that (ruling) within 30 seconds, probably,” said Mark Dusbabeck, the tour official who oversees the center and serves as NBC and CBS’s on-air rules analyst.
Dusbabeck said there still may be a handful of blind spots that cameras can’t see week-to-week, but overall it’s been a positive since it debuted earlier this year. The Review Center helped correctly identify a high-profile situation with Wyndham Clark last week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, and Dusbabeck claimed it’s also assisted the tour in speeding up pace of play, a hot-button issue in recent years.
The Review Center is 340 square feet (20’x17′) and is typically staffed with one person monitoring PGA Tour Live as well as the network feeds. Dusbabeck says if he has his way, that number will double in 2026. On Thursday, with the Players being the tour’s marquee event, four personnel were manning the room. Dusbabeck worked with the NHL, NFL and NBA and their respective review centers as he scoped out plans for PGA Tour Studios.
“That’s where we’re going with this,” Dusbabeck said. “Number one, we can protect our players. Number two, we can just make sure we get it right in a matter of minutes, a matter of seconds.”
