Are Hole Locations at the 2026 PGA Championship Too Hard?

Two days into the PGA Championship, a new hot-button subject has emerged. No longer is tree removal in the crosshairs. Now, it’s course setup.

“Most of the pins today were, I mean, kind of absurd,” Scottie Scheffler said after Friday’s round. “This is the hardest set of pin locations that I've seen since I've been on Tour, and that includes U.S. Opens, that includes Oakmont.” Scheffler added that his caddie, Ted Scott, and Justin Rose’s caddie, “Fooch,” could only think of Shinnecock as another venue with similarly difficult hole locations.

Scheffler is not alone in placing the Aronimink setup under a microscope. You don’t have to search far to find more critiques of the hole locations, with many attributing a highly condensed leaderboard to inaccessible hole locations. When pins are too tucked and dangerous to attack, every player hits to the same spots away from the hole, reducing variance and creating a narrow range of outcomes: just pars and bogeys, not many birdies. At least that’s a prevalent theory floating around.

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I’ll note that some of the ire seems to be coming from gambling-centric corners of the internet, where perceptions of a golf tournament may not be entirely isolated from investments or how a leaderboard was expected to look.

Nonetheless, if the overarching takeaway through 36 holes is that the PGA botched the setup, then we’ve lost the plot. The course setup has been good. Excellent, even. I would argue that the PGA has nailed the setup through two days. A golf course many expected to be steamrolled has held its ground without resorting to gimmicks.

Hole locations have been tricky, and sure, the theory they have made holing putts difficult and somewhat compressed the top of the leaderboard holds water. But anybody bothering to actually watch the golf tournament can see that scoring chances are available. Chris Gotterup fired a 5-under 65 on Friday morning in blustery, chilly morning conditions — the harder scoring window of the two waves.

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The best, most substantive critique of the setup is that Aronimink is not placing a high premium on driving accuracy. Wide misses, often finding a manageable lie in the rough and unobstructed to the green, are not meeting a severe penalty, or even a mild one. Co-leader Maverick McNealy has hit just 11 of 28 fairways, ranking T-144 out of 156 players in the field. Aldrich Potgieter, a certified sprayer, held the lead for much of the first two rounds while hitting it all over the golf course. Through two rounds, none of the top eight names on the leaderboard rank better than T-74 in fairways hit.

Still, the leaderboard is already stacked with talent. Describing the top of the leaderboard as unskillful would be a big overstatement. Two of the top three players in the world are within two of the lead as it currently stands. The golf course has ruffled players’ feathers, exposed imprecise iron play, punished short-sided misses around greens, and assembled a talented group of contenders within striking distance of a major championship. I strongly suspect the best players in the world will have every opportunity to separate themselves by Sunday evening and dispel the notion that the setup muted skill.

But beyond how the final leaderboard shakes out, Aronimink has already succeeded in an area that feels like it should still count for something: delivering a major championship test that is both demanding and entertaining to watch.