Rough "penalty" at 2025 US Open

I Just read the blog “Who benefits from wide fairways” and really liked it. One thing in particular that caught my eye was the chart showing expected strokes to hole out from both the fairway and rough. I was very surprised to see that, roughly speaking, from 75-225 yards there seems to be a constant 0.25 stroke “penalty” for hitting in the rough.

What I want to know is if you guys have created a similar chart for this year’s US open. I know the rough is generally pretty bad at majors, and maybe this is just recency bias, but I can’t remember a tournament where the rough felt so penal. I’m curious if the spread is constant, and if so what the rough “penalty” was.

I’m curious because I’ve thrown together a very rough calculation/simulation just to see if it’s even remotely possible that laying back off the tee was at least a semi viable strategy compared to hitting driver. I’m under the impression that, barring hazards and that sort of thing this would never, ever be the case on a standard hole for pros, but the rough looked so brutal at Oakmont it did make me curious if trading off a few yards for more accuracy could pay off. My current estimations say no, but it’s not as far off as I would have thought.

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We do not have a chart showing rough penalty by distance from Oakmont (might not be enough data to do it well… but I will look into it, would be interesting newsletter content).

We do have the overall rough penalty (strokes to hole out differential between rough/fairway from same distance) shown on our course table. Oakmont’s penalty was the highest we’ve seen since 2015!

Oh wow this course table is awesome thanks for sharing. I think this overall rough penalty is still very helpful for my purposes. Surprised to see the fairways are 28 yards wide as well. I was assuming a bit higher so this changes things.

Lot of interesting stuff in this table though, might be getting some other ideas

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