Sam Burns knows exactly who moves fast on a golf course and who does not. He played fast and still ate the penalty, because officials clocked the group he was in rather than the one player actually falling behind. Burns eventually walked away from the PGA Tour’s pace-of-play committee, and he explained why in blunt terms during a recent sit-down on the Fore Play Podcast, calling the tour’s slow-play system a waste of time.

Burns joined the committee not long after the tour formed it, and his frustration built quickly. Officials would flag the entire group instead of isolating whoever was actually slow, and Burns grew tired of absorbing blame for a pace that wasn’t his.

“Take me off the committee. I’m out. Like, this is a waste of time,” Burns said on the Podcast.

He told hosts he raised the same objection to tour officials more than once. Slower players paired with Burns would lean on his pace to stay in position, and officials would still flag the whole threesome. It happened two or three times, Burns said, before he asked to be taken off the committee for good.

The course itself came up too. Group-timing rules apply the same standard to every hole, no matter how much walking separates one shot from the next. Burns pointed to Hilton Head as a layout that keeps pace manageable in twosomes, compared to routings that force players to walk 120 yards in the opposite direction after finishing a hole. A stopwatch on the group doesn’t account for that kind of built-in delay.

Burns isn’t the only one griping. Lucas Glover called the tour’s field-size cuts an insult to players’ intelligence back in November 2024, telling Golfweek that officials “think we’re stupid” for using pace of play as cover. Matt Fitzpatrick piled on over social media that same week, calling it “pathetic” that pace of play gets discussed every year with nothing changing. Bryson DeChambeau, after his prolonged read at the Northern Trust years earlier, suggested timing entire rounds instead of individual shots, the opposite of what Burns wants. Burns just wants officials tracking whoever’s actually causing the delay, so his playing partners stop eating the penalty for it.

Ryan Fox came up more than once in the conversation. Burns and Fox were paired together in the final round of this year’s Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, where Burns carried a two-shot lead into Sunday only to shoot 72 while Fox birdied four of his last six holes, including the 72nd, to steal the Claret Jug by one shot. Burns finished third.

The two are also frequent playing partners on tour, and it’s Fox, not some notoriously slow player, whom the hosts jokingly crowned the tour’s unofficial “czar of slow play,” with Burns cast as his “vice president.” The irony: they’re both fast. It’s the kind of mismatch between reputation and reality that fueled Burns’ complaint about the committee in the first place.

Burns also ran through his pre-shot routine on the show, timing himself live: read the number, pick a club, hit the ball.

“That took about eight seconds,” Riggs said after Burns ran through the sequence live on the show.

The Tour’s Data-Driven Fix Is Already Underway

Group timing exists because the tour can’t track every shot for every player. With 156-man fields and cameras covering only a handful of holes, individual tracking was never realistic. Fans kept complaining anyway. The PGA Tour’s Fan Forward Initiative has flagged pace of play as one of the top issues fans raise, and slow rounds keep drawing criticism for dragging out broadcasts and testing viewers’ patience.

Officials started collecting those numbers in 2026, tournament by tournament and as season averages. Korn Ferry Tour players will see a speed-of-play ranking first, and the PGA Tour could adopt it down the line. It’s essentially what Burns wanted the whole time: track the player who’s slow, not everyone stuck playing with him.

Whether that data ever reaches the PGA Tour is still an open question. But if it does, Burns finally gets the tool he says was missing from the committee, a number that names the actual slow player instead of dragging his group down with him.