Great comment. The overlapping circles were distracting around the targets for 1, 16, and 17. That was my bogey. I will correct that next year on 1 and 16 for sure. 17's B pin may be difficult to move much to the right and still retain the visibility that helps to lure ace runs like Ricky's wonderful shot.
Did you find value in the bullseye (gold) 3-meter circles? Our goal in introducing these was to mark excellence in driving and to allow for the removal of the very short range putts from the putting statistics.
Hey Harold, thanks for stopping by.
I found value in the bullseye metric and enjoy viewing all the metrics/stats for the field. However, if you have any say in the matter, Avery/Jamie still talk about them too much. It's great to reference them in terms of how a hole plays or how well a player plays over a round, but "that's another green hit for Player X" is meaningless to say during commentary. (On the other hand, I haven't watched all the edited videos from this year yet.)
As for the course changes, I have split opinions.
3: Didn't like the hazard in the woods
4: Liked getting rid of the left side hazard. If you feel like throwing it way over there, be my guest.
5: I wasn't a big fan of the mando in the first place, but I understand making it a trickier approach shot than just a big spike hyzer. The right-hand pin fixes that for rounds 2-3 without needing the mando. Maybe moving the left-hand pin straight left closer to the water could provide a different challenge? It'd open the spike hyzer back up, but would put more emphasis on properly placing your approach shot.
9: Like the change. Old 9 didn't really have much decision-making. There was no way to go for the eagle, so every player played it exactly the same. I was expecting a good handful of 2s on the new layout, but maybe it was the wind that messed that up this year.
13: Like the change in general. Maybe some minor tweaking, as you said.
15: Like the change in general, but I'm not sold on the trellis for defining the mando. Were the two previous trees not challenging enough? Or were they too offset from each other to make it an actual challenge? The upper mando seems like overkill to me - the canopy from the trees prevents any high shot anyway.
Live vs recorded video:
This is mostly personal preference no matter what way you slice it. A year or two ago I would go nuts and watch every McFly/Jomez/CCDG as soon as they came out, but over the course of this year I've grown pretty bored of them. At this point, I've seen most of the courses that these guys film, and if I already know the outcome of the tournament, I'm really not interested in watching them any more.
I've been watching a lot more of the live Smashboxx broadcasts this year. I know the quality isn't great, I know it can be boring watching people line up their shots, but live sports
always provides more drama than recorded sports. (It also helps that I've been stuck at home after ACL surgery this year and haven't been out playing on the weekends.) (Also, all you people complaining that live footage is boring because all it is is people walking down the fairway -- the main time sink is waiting for everyone to line up their shots or waiting for the group in front of them to putt out. Walking 300 feet really doesn't take that much time.)
I would, of course, prefer to have both. But I'm not the guy spending the money to make it happen. Would I pay for live coverage? Maybe $5 or so, but if you charge you'd lose 50% of the already-small live audience and make live coverage even less attractive to advertisers.
Post round edited coverage
must continue, and live coverage is just a bonus. I just like live coverage, personally.
Thanks,
Todd Lion