For years, golf fans have argued the PGA Tour’s pace-of-play rules are all bark and no bite. Golfers get 40 seconds per shot, or 50 seconds if you’re the first to play in certain spots, like a second shot on a par-5 before penalty strikes, but does it ever? At the Cognizant Classic, Max Homa provided the perfect, 155-second-long example of why fans are right.

On the par-5 10th, with 541 yards ahead and no one in the way, Max Homa took two minutes and 35 seconds over his second shot. It’s well past the 120-second mark that counts as an Excessive Shot Time infraction. The clip surfaced on the same afternoon it happened, and the reaction across social media was not surprise so much as a familiar frustration from fans who have watched this argument go unresolved for years.

A fan noted that Homa should be given a cap with “Megaslow” written on it, and one person called for him to be kicked off the Tour. This isn’t the first time Homa has been called out for slow play. In 2024 at the BMW Championship, an X user posted a video of Homa, calling him the most unserious on the Tour, and he claimed that Homa had taken more than 15 minutes to hit a shot. The golfer clapped back, saying that he was waiting on a rules official and not just playing slow.

The slow play rules are clear. The first bad time is just a warning, with no stroke penalty. Only after a second bad time in the same tournament do penalties come into play. But before any of this happens, the group has to be ruled out of position. Only then are players timed. This chain of decisions means that, in practice, warnings are rare and penalties even rarer. On the PGA Tour, stroke penalties for slow play have almost disappeared in recent years.

Rory McIlroy has called slow play an epidemic since 2019. He has pushed for smaller fields and stricter tee times as solutions. At the 2025 Irish Open, his own group was timed and warned over the last three holes, but no penalty was given.

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This is not unique. The same pattern repeats, no matter who is involved. The enforcement reality does not begin and end with this incident at PGA National. Homa has been here before. He made a public promise three years ago, but nothing has changed.

Max Homa’s 2023 slow-play pledge did not hold true

At the 2023 WGC Match Play, a putting routine that took nearly 50 seconds went viral, drawing four million views. Homa said he would work on speeding up. He told reporters he planned to change his AimPoint straddling because he did not like how it looked on camera.

Homa’s 2025 season had no wins and nine missed cuts in 24 starts, and by February 2026, he was ranked World No. 150. There was no competitive pressure from the Tour. Even before the Cognizant Classic, fans questioned why he was in a $20 million Signature Event when his ranking had dropped outside the top 140. This incident only amplified existing frustrations among fans as they were already asking if accountability was being applied at all.

Homa’s playing partners, Ryan Gerard and Michael Brennan, still had to wait through the 155-second routine. The Tour announced six changes for fairness and consistency at the start of 2026, but slow-play enforcement was not one of them, apparently.

Homa shot 2 over for the day and finished 82nd, but a question remains: if a 155-second routine on a clear fairway, caught on live broadcast, does not trigger formal timing, what will?