Grading Recent U.S. Open Venues

Another major championship is in the books. Today, we’re grading the last eight U.S. Open venues. Why eight? Because I need to see Erin Hills again to give it a fair shake, and Chambers Bay is a much better golf course today than in 2015, so grading it based on its presentation 10 years ago doesn’t feel appropriate. Thus, eight it is. Plus, a few shoutouts for performances in the season’s first three men’s majors and reflections after a week spent on the grounds at Oakmont Country Club.

Shinnecock Hills and Pinehurst No. 2 are head and shoulders above the rest of the U.S. Open venues right now. Firm and fast golf courses with tight green surrounds bring out the best in professional golf. Those two golf courses will produce a special tournament every time we visit them. 

My rationale for Oakmont’s grade is provided below. 

A firmer, faster LACC (North) with a positive fan experience would push an A or A- rating. In part due to the marine layer, LACC never played as bouncy and firm as I expected it to play. Combine that with a lousy fan experience that muted the overall energy of the championship, I can’t grade it any higher than a B-. 

I’m not the first person to make this point, but it is a little bit disappointing scrolling through future U.S. Open sites and seeing no new venues (at least through 2042). Even having just one wild card course to anticipate would breed some excitement. I’d like to see the USGA prioritize introducing a new venue on a regular basis, though finding suitable venues is much easier said than done. 

Miscellaneous 2025 Major Stats

After major championships, I like to zoom out and take a high-level view of performances to date. Often, we’re fixated – or at least I am – on top finishers in each championship while some strong performances can quietly slip under the radar. So for this week, I’ve perused results from the first three men’s major to see who deserves a shoutout. 

Matt Wallace is one of three golfers who have played in at least two majors this season and gained strokes on the field in every round he has played. The other two golfers are Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele, who have each gained strokes in all 12 major championship rounds they’ve played this year. Wallace did not qualify for the Masters, but he finished T-17 at the PGA Championship and T-23 at this past weekend’s U.S. Open. Sneaky good! 

Only two golfers have played in at least two major championships this season and finished in the top 10 in every appearance: Scheffler (3) and Ben Griffin (2). Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm are the only other players with at least two top 10s in majors this season. We’ll see what the rest of the season has in store for Griffin, but he is playing very good golf right now. 

I’ve been critical of Tom Kim’s game historically, primarily from a place of pushing back on the “global superstar” label that was assigned to him on “Full Swing.” I stand behind all of my skepticism about how high Kim’s ceiling is, but I want to give him credit for the way he’s shown up in majors. Tom is having the worst season of his young PGA Tour career. Currently ranked 52nd in the world, this is his lowest OWGR position since June of 2022, which is right about when he burst onto the pro golf scene. Still, he’s one of just 22 golfers who have made the cut in all three of the majors this year. While his best finish in those championships is a T-33, it’s impressive to see Kim making cuts despite going through a downturn in his career. Since the start of 2023, Tom has made nine cuts in his last 11 major championship starts. Only six golfers have made more. I continue to doubt his chances of contending consistently in strong fields, but he deserves a lot of credit for getting the most out of his game at golf’s biggest events, both when he’s in and out of form. 

Reflections on the 2025 U.S. Open 

On Wednesdays following a major, I may start using this section to reflect on the biggest takeaways from whichever major just wrapped. Usually, it takes a couple of days for the dust to settle and for my thoughts to crystallize. So here are a couple of my thoughts on the 2025 U.S. Open. 

1. Oakmont played pretty much exactly how I expected it to. My biggest takeaway both leading up to the championship and during competition was how glaringly obvious it is that we’re playing the golf course a little bit out of scale. 

What do I mean? 

Take No. 15, for example. It’s a 500-yard par 4 featuring a ~26-yard wide fairway that slopes hard from left to right, drastically reducing the effective landing area.

When the golf course was firm on Thursday and Friday, players hit the fairway 41% and 48% of the time, respectively. Typically when you’re seeing fairway percentages under 50%, a hole is playing too narrow to accommodate modern shot patterns. 

Before I go on, I don’t have a problem with fairways playing ultra-narrow if there’s a small penalty for barely missing the fairway and a steeper penalty for a wide miss. But when just missing a very narrow fairway results in a potentially huge penalty, a hole can play more randomly than is ideal in my estimation. We had that dynamic in play at Oakmont on a few holes, like No. 15.

I walked with Scottie during his first round. He hit a pretty good tee shot on 15, looked at his caddie and said, “That should be good, right, Teddy?” Once he got up to the ball, he found that it had trickled into the rough, at which point it was subject to whatever lie Oakmont gave him. Fortunately for Scottie, he’d found a good enough lie to advance it around the green. 

Nonetheless, a 25-yard wide fairway sloping hard left-to-right with fast, tight fairways plays a little too narrowly, from my perspective. It’s not poor design, it’s a symptom of taking a golf course built more than 100 years ago and cranking up the speeds.

See how many shots trickled into the right rough down the fairway slope? The hole would play better if it were a little more reasonable to keep the ball in the fairway. This is a phenomenon we also see on the greens, as some hole locations can get pretty dicey when the greens are firm and stimping in the 15s. Another symptom of the same underlying root cause: a mismatch of scale between the original design and the current game.  

I thoroughly enjoyed Oakmont and thought it was a strong test. I didn’t have any issue with the thick rough, other than that it’s ridiculous that we need a 5.5-inch rough to protect par in the modern game. But I’m very pro-Oakmont, appreciative of its identity, and thought it provided a solid test.  

I just remain very confident that Oakmont would play better at a slightly smaller scale, closer to the way it was built. I’m not saying we need to return to distances from 1903, but if golfers hit the ball a little bit shorter, we wouldn’t need to crank the speeds up quite so much, and holes like No. 15 would play a little bit better. We’d also lessen the frequency of players getting away with wide misses that find trampled down spectator areas or adjacent fairways.

I’d love to see golfers attack Oakmont with less forgiving drivers, a shorter, spinnier ball, and slightly shorter rough. The absurd rough length injected a fair amount of randomness into the championship, but it’s also a necessary feature if you’re intent on protecting the value of par, which is a fairly reasonable objective. 

So that’s why I’ve given Oakmont a B+. It’s a brilliant design, we just aren’t letting the golf course play to its full potential right now. And to those of you who are fatigued of equipment and rollback talk, it’s not going anywhere. It’s important! 

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2. J.J. Spaun is a really cool winner. He isn’t the most popular name in pro golf, but he is a worthy champion. He wasn’t on my short list of contenders, but he isn’t a fluke winner, either. J.J. has flushed the ball all season, ranking seventh on Tour in Strokes Gained: Approach. He lost in a playoff to Rory McIlroy at the Players Championship. He isn’t a scrub. You can’t hang around on Tour for a decade unless you’re a bona fide pro, and J.J. Spaun is. 

Big names may sell most of the tickets, but stories like Spaun’s inspire a lot of golfers around the world to keep plugging away and achieving success on their own timelines. The beauty of golf, especially an open championship like the U.S. Open, is that anybody can win. I’m eager to see what Spaun’s next 12-14 months look like, but I have a lot more confidence in what Spaun can bring to the table at Bethpage than many other Americans who may make the Ryder Cup team. 

Ok, that’s all for this week. We’ll get back to questions next week. Have a question you want me to answer? Email me at joseph@thefriedegg.com!