Inside PGA Tour Video Review Room

• The PGA Tour’s Video Review Room, based in Ponte Vedra, coordinates with officials to resolve rules issues
• The Tour introduced the rules room in January
• The room is part of the 165,000-square-foot PGA Tour Studios building

On a sunny Friday morning inside PGA Tour Studios, peering through one of the hundreds of cameras sweeping The Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, Rich Pierson has spotted trouble.

At the rightmost of the three main workstations inside the Video Review Room, Pierson scans his screen panel. He sees eight-time PGA Tour winner Patrick Cantlay, playing a group with Keegan Bradley and Rickie Fowler. He sees PGA Tour rules official Robby Ware, speaking at Cantlay’s side. He sees a rules decision in the making.

“Once he [Cantlay] hit the ball, we were able to see it was on the cart path,” said Pierson, the PGA Tour’s director of television rules. “I alerted Robby.”

At The Players Championship, the PGA Tour’s Video Review Room needed only seconds to roll into action.

Inside the 165,000-square-foot PGA Tour Studios building in Ponte Vedra Beach, two solid 3-wood shots east of the famous 17th tee box at The Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, the Video Review Room is charting the next frontier in golf officiating.

For Mark Dusbabek, PGA Tour senior director and lead TV rules and video analyst, it’s the culmination of a project in the works for more than three years.

“We found a home, finally,” he said.

Inside the room

Inside the rectangular room of 17 by 20 feet, Dusbabek and Pierson traced their eyes across scores of screens Friday, working alongside PGA Tour TV rules and video analyst Orlando Pope and ShotLink producer Corey Cruse.

In all, officials in the Video Review Room have access to 144 television cameras and 146 ShotLink cameras across the Stadium Course, which practically blanket the grounds from every conceivable angle.

Almost every square inch of the course lies within the reach of some camera, somewhere.

On Friday, Stephan Jaeger’s third shot on the par-5 No. 2 sailed astray, bounding 317 yards off a cart path and grinding to a halt atop the practice green adjacent to the Mediterranean-style clubhouse, a landing spot so unlikely that ShotLink’s system described it simply as “unknown.” Yet cameras were there.

With that near-ubiquitous presence, the Video Review Room coordinates instantly with rules officials on the ground along the course.

“A lot of times, we can see it before the official [in the area] even knows it happens,” Dusbabek said. “So we can get that official over to that area and get him prepared for whatever ruling is already coming up.”

Such is the world of the PGA Tour’s Video Review Room, where since Jan. 1, the PGA Tour has pieced together the tricky decisions from the world of golf, both at The Players Championship and beyond.

The birth of the Video Review Room is just one new element made possible by the construction of the PGA Tour Studios, which began full operation this year adjacent to the Tour’s Global Home in Ponte Vedra.

Inside that building are top-of-the-line facilities for all sorts of programming, ranging from PGA Tour Champions coverage to ESPN Bet webcasts. Audio, video and production control rooms are there, including the new World Feed, which launched this week for The Players.

“Pretty much every weekend,” said Luis Goicouria, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of media, “we’ve been hitting another milestone.”

Stepping into action

In the Video Review Room, not all of the work stays behind the scenes.

From roughing the passer penalties to juggling catches along the sideline, NFL viewers are used to hearing rules analysts like Terry McAulay (NBC), Mike Pereira (Fox) and Gene Steratore (CBS) weigh in during controversial moments on the gridiron.

These days, after visits to similar video facilities for other major American sports, Dusbabek and the Video Review Room team are giving golf viewers their own similar opportunities, opening a window into the often-complicated ruling process. Dusbabek said he visited replay centers for the NBA, NFL and NHL during the planning process.

“We gathered up a lot of information from everybody trying to put it all together,” he said.

During a tournament, officials in the Video Review Room can appear on camera during a broadcast or communicate with the viewing audience through audio. Dusbabek estimated that PGA Tour rules staff might appear from three to five times a week, although the numbers can vary depending on the tournament and the conditions.

The Video Review Room has changed the weekly routine for the officials. Before the room’s construction, Dusbabek said, he worked alongside Pope inside a television truck among the broadcasters, and the procedures were far more complicated.

“I remember Mark Russell [former PGA Tour vice president of competitions] used to have to get in his cart, drive to the TV compound, go into the production trailer, have them queue it up and and pull it up so he could look at it,” Dusbabek said.

That, Dusbabek said, exposed players to the potential for inaccurate rumors. For example, spectators can see officials heading to the television area and assume a player is getting a penalty, when that’s not the case.

And all that cross-course travel could take a while. On the Stadium Course, there’s no time to lose.

Trouble on hole 1

At Daytona International Speedway, an hour’s drive to the south of the Stadium Course, they’d call it “trouble in turn 1.”

In the Video Review Room for The Players, there’s trouble on hole No. 1.

In Friday’s marquee group, Rory McIlroy is cruising near the top of the leaderboard. Scottie Scheffler is steady, battling through hiccups on the green in pursuit of a third consecutive title. Xander Schauffele… is not.

The two-time major champion has found trouble on the par-4 first, and the Video Review Room is all over it.

“You look at the screen up there at the top,” Dusbabek said. “He’s along the edge of the cart path, so Rich has already called in that area. He’s already called the official, and we know the officials in that area have said, ‘Xander’s over here at No. 1, near the cart path, and he may need relief.’ So [the local official] will come over there and be waiting in the side.”

It doesn’t take long. Schauffele gets his ruling quickly. He takes a drop among the trees, 136 yards from the hole, and escapes with a par. Eight hours later, his streak of 59 made cuts on the PGA Tour — sixth longest in history behind Tiger Woods, Byron Nelson, Jack Nicklaus, Hale Irwin and Dow Finsterwald — adds another week to his list.

“Rather than an official trying to make his way over from No. 2 green and fight through that crowd,” Dusbabek said, “he’s already on the rope line, ready.”

‘You guys go ahead’

Jordan Spieth walked along the right side of the fairway at the par-4 12th on Thursday morning. Peering down toward his half-swallowed golf ball in the Ponte Vedra rough, he didn’t like what he saw.

A lousy lie. Trouble. He called ahead to his playing partners, Wyndham Clark and Danny Walker, both of them already on the green.

“You guys go ahead,” Spieth shouted, clearly audible from the adjacent cart path. “It’s going to be a little while.”

A little while, yes… but not long. The Video Review Room was ready.

Dusbabek and the Tour staff saw the ball settle into the the unexpected low spot shortly after ball left club.

“We had already called it out,” Dusbabek said. “We already told [the official on the scene] that he was going to ask for relief on this. We’re not sure what it is because we couldn’t see into the grass.”

Relief received. Officials quickly ratified Spieth’s request, and after a drop, the three-time major champion went on to par the hole.

‘We squashed it all’

In the short existence of the Video Review Room, Dusbabek said its most complex issue to date popped up a week ago at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

Clark took relief from a pitch mark on the par-4 third in the second round at Bay Hill and went on to par the hole. Internet commentators felt otherwise, and made their virtual voices heard.

The complicated part, Dusbabek said, was finding the necessary video to demonstrate that the pitch mark involved was Clark’s, thus permitting him to take relief. Once they found it, officials in the Video Review Room played back the ShotLink video evidence. They sided with Clark, and immediately, Dusbabek said he contacted NBC producer Tommy Roy.

“I tell him I have this video and I think we need to cover this on air,” Dusbabek said. “Tommy looks at it and he says, ‘I need a tape of that. I want to run that. Let’s put it together with the regular program feed, and I want you to be brought in and talk about it.'”

Not that the process was without some consternation for Clark, who said he wasn’t aware of the issue until he had completed his Bay Hill round and found himself in the middle of a social media flare-up.

“I approached scoring and they approached me like, hey, there’s something that’s going to come up in media about what happened on 3,” Clark said in Tuesday’s press conference before The Players. “I was like, on 3? I hit it in the middle of the fairway, hit it on the green and two-putt. I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’

He goes, ‘It’s your drop.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean, did I do an improper drop?’ He said, ‘Well, we didn’t know if you were plugged.’ Long story short is you’re OK.”

For Dusbabek, Clark’s experience illustrates one more benefit of the Video Review Room: whether the network is called Twitter or X, swift response from the Tour can quickly bring an extinguisher to online firestorms.

“He was getting hammered on social media,” Dusbabek said, “and we squashed it all.”

The Video Review Room: Up next?

In golf, anything can happen. At the Players, very often, it does.

Like the uninvited feathered guest who performed an avian confiscation of Brad Fabel’s golf ball on the 17th in 1998, then dropped the less-than-delectable morsel into the waters surrounding the Island Green.

While Dusbabek can’t predict twists and turns like that, some future trends in rules aren’t hard to forecast, like a point of emphasis laid down by PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan himself: slow play.

Monahan announced Tuesday the formation of a new slow-play policy, although some details remain under construction. That, Dusbabek said, could eventually become an issue for the Video Review Room.

Dusbabek acknowledges that pure clock time, by itself, doesn’t measure the reason for a player’s slow speed.

“I do have a ticker on the bottom of my screen that I can tell how long it took him to play that shot,” he said. “So I can pass that on to them [officials on the course], but they need to give me the whole entire scope of what’s happening on the course.”

A player’s delay could be justified by trouble in the group ahead, or an unexpected challenge with a playing partner. It could be something weirder.

On Thursday, an unidentified large waterfowl waddled across the fairway in front of Ben Kohles’ second shot at the par-5 No. 2. A few yards closer to the golfer, and the intrusion easily could have held up play.

But the Video Review Room, it appears, is already speeding up the game now. Back to the room, and the issue with the Patrick Cantlay drop. Pierson, in constant communication with officials on the scene, gets it resolved, and quickly. Cantlay goes on to easily make the cut for the weekend’s rounds, steadily ascending the leaderboard with a 69-70-70.

“This is all in real time,” Pierson said. “We talk about pace of play. This is something that is a big asset to the staff on the golf course.”

“That’s shaved probably three minutes off our round today,” Dusbabek added, following the ruling. “Now you do that another 10 times, that’s 30 minutes during the day.”

The ruling is done. But there’s no time to take it easy.

Sooner or later, somewhere from No. 1 to No. 18, spanning from Florida to California and beyond the national borders, the next big decision is coming soon.

“You always have a lot weighing on you, but that’s part of our job,” Dusbabek said. “It becomes second nature to us.”