Criticism mounts against the PGA Tour for another year of low scores at the Cognizant Classic. But is it really the PGA Tour’s fault? It is not, and as a 14-time Cognizant Classic player, Billy Horschel wants the right people, the PGA National, to be blamed.

“I talked about it last year. This is a really good golf course. It’s a very fair golf course,” Horschel said Thursday. “When it blows hard, it’s a challenge, and when it’s benign like it is today, it’s gettable.”

“A few years ago, the rough was longer, and then they started cutting it down, and then they overseeded the golf course,” he added. “I think the Tour gets a bad rap, and it’s not anything against the owners of PGA National. I understand where they would want to overseed. People want it to look pretty on TV, and if it looks pretty on TV, maybe people will want to come play it.”

“But at the end of the day, as I’ve said for many years on the PGA Tour, I understand we are using a golf course that we don’t own a lot of times, and sometimes we’re at the discretion of what the owner wants to do. Obviously, we give our opinion of what we think is best for the golf course and how they want to set it up and challenge it, but the owners also have a say in it,” he continued. “It’s nothing against the owners of PGA National. They’ve done a great job of hosting this event.”

In 2021, the Champion Course was the third most difficult on the PGA Tour. In 2025, it dropped to the 35th most difficult. Sungjae Im won the event in 2020, shooting 6-under when it was a par 70. Then, in 2023, Chris Kirk was 14 under, and the course record has been broken every year since. Austin Eckroat was 17-under in 2024 when the tournament went from par 70 to par 71. The trend continued in 2025.

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Jake Knapp opened with 12 under in the first round. Horschel shot 66. The winner, Joe Highsmith, ultimately won with a tournament-record 19-under. This year, Austin Smotherman carded a 62 in the opening round, equaling the fourth-lowest score in the 20 years the event has been played at PGA National.

The science explains all of this. When perennial ryegrass is overseeded into dormant Bermuda, it creates a denser, more uniform surface that cushions ball contact and produces cleaner lies, particularly in the rough and around greens.

This was not the first time Horschel raised the issue this week. A day before his round, he talked about the same thing on X.

Billy Horschel isn’t the only one who noticed this. Brooks Koepka also echoed the same POV. He mentioned chipping around the greens has become significantly easier, and he expects scores to trend lower because of the overseeding. He added that on straight Bermuda, especially after heavy foot traffic, the grain makes chipping genuinely unpredictable, but the ryegrass takes that variable away entirely.

Shane Lowry, who lives in Florida and plays Bermuda courses regularly as a member nearby, shares the same view. He would rather see PGA National play the way it used to and points out that Bermuda courses in the area are in excellent shape this time of year, without any overseeding at all.

Well, the setup problem is not the only thing hurting the Cognizant Classic this year.

The Cognizant Classic has a tough spot on the PGA Tour calendar

The $9.6 million event sits in a brutal stretch of the schedule right between two Signature Events, the Genesis Invitational and the Arnold Palmer Invitational, with The Players Championship following shortly after. Top players simply cannot play five weeks straight.

The contrast with the week before is stark. The Genesis Invitational featured all of the world’s top 10 and 41 of the top 50. The Cognizant Classic had no player inside the world’s top 20 in its field, with World No. 26 Ryan Gerard as the highest-ranked starter after Ben Griffin, Jacob Bridgeman, and Adam Scott all withdrew.

Justin Thomas, a former winner at PGA National, put it plainly, “It has fallen at an unfortunate time in the schedule… guys can’t play four or five in a row.”

Until the Tour reshuffles the calendar, the Cognizant Classic will continue to lose the names that make a $9.6 million event feel worth the price. As of now, PGA National needs to sort the issue of overseeding.