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Why offset might be making a comeback on the PGA Tour
Welcome to Fully Equipped’s weekly Tour equipment report. Every Friday of PGA Tour weeks (plus other times, if news warrants), GOLF equipment editor Jack Hirsh runs you through some of the biggest news surrounding golf clubs on Tour, including changes, tweaks and launches.
ST. LOUIS — There’s a sneaky trend going on with wedges on the PGA Tour, and it’s something wedge designers have spent the last decade-plus eradicating.
Over the past year, Rickie Fowler and Gary Woodland started playing Cleveland prototype RTZ wedges with a ton of offset built into them. We’re talking aggressive goose-neck hosels.
With Fowler having a solid year and Woodland earning his first victory since the 2019 U.S. Open, it appears other players and OEMs have taken notice.
That includes Cobra, which now has both Woodland and Fowler playing offset versions of Cobra’s King and Snake Bite wedges.
“I think it’s definitely a contact component in there,” Ben Schomin, Cobra’s tour operations manager, told GOLF about Woodland and Fowler’s wedges. “They both feel like they can center it up more. They can keep it lower on the face longer. That increased offset actually provides a little bit more shaft lean at impact, which, you know, allows them to basically flight the ball a little lower. Keep it lower on the face longer. Just feel like they have more control.”
Those benefits were echoed by Michael Jolly, Cleveland/Srixon’s director of tour operations. Cleveland has been working on RTZ prototypes with offset in them since last summer, spurred by the return of company founder Roger Cleveland.
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“For us, it really came from Roger Cleveland,” Jolly said. “He is a big believer in offset — see the Cleveland 485 wedge — and its benefits. Primarily, it’s knowing that the built-in shaft lean, really prevents the ball from ‘riding the face’. That shot that rides the face, comes out higher than anticipated with less spin. Players that experiment with offset see a ball that comes out lower with more spin.”
While Cleveland has been working on these wedges for more than a year, Cobra started exploring the increased offset concept over the past four or five months, Schomin said.
It started with Schomin double-bending the lower part of the hosel on wedges to add offset. This week, though, the truck started getting 3D-printed prototypes with offset already baked in.
Schomin added that it’s funny to talk about the offset design because it’s something that was common in wedge design 15 years ago. Offset is something legendary short-game instructor Phil Rodgers, who worked with Cobra on the original Trusty Rusty wedge, believed was important to the design. Schomin pointed out that he was mentored by Rodgers as well and felt the same.
“The offset that we’re talking about now, if we looked at a wedge from, say, 30 or 40 years ago, it probably [would be] quite similar,” Schomin said. “So it seems like over the years, you know, especially in wedge design, offset has become less.”
And while both Cobra and Cleveland are intentionally taking offset to the extreme, other OEMs seem to be playing with it to match specific player preferences.
Last week, Cameron Young switched back to a Vokey K* lob wedge, the same grind he had used for much of the past two seasons, from a 64T lob wedge bent to 62˚ to remove the bounce he used as conditions got firmer this summer.
One of the most popular lob wedge grinds on the PGA TOUR, the K* features a low-bounce sole that originates from the .06K Grind. Instead of the full, smooth sole of the K, the K* features a steeper pre-wear on the leading edge as well as heel, toe and trailing edge relief. The pre-wear helps resist excessive digging on square-faced shots, while the heel, toe and trailing edge relief adds greenside versatility when the face is opened. Like all K Grind variations, K* has a wide sole that excels out of the bunker. Justin Thomas, Lottie Woad, Cameron Young and the 2024 Champion Golfer of the Year are among the many players who travel with a K* lob wedge in their bag week in and week out.
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Bending that 64 strong also added a good bit of offset, something Young wanted replicated in a new K*. His gamer K* is also 62˚, but it’s bent weak from 60, which actually removes offset.
To make the weak K* look more like the strong 64T, Vokey tour tep Aaron Dill double-bent the hosel to create the additional offset.
“His has always been good for him, but when he made the switch to the 64 it came with that slight change in appearance,” Dill said. “We wanted to make the least amount of changes here and simply provide the same support and forgiveness he loves in K*-Grind but with the looks he was more recently familiar with.”
Dill made it clear Young’s change was purely a visual preference rather than seeking the performance benefits of offset.
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Last year, Ping did something similar for Sahith Theegala when Kenton Oates and Adam Harding took a 62˚ S159 wedge and bent it to 59˚ and reground the sole to account for the lost bounce.
And last week, Collin Morikawa made a surprise move to play a highly customized TaylorMade MG5 lob wedge with a double-bent hosel. The goal was for Morikawa to get his hands more forward while chipping.
So is offset coming back to wedges or are these just one-offs for specific players? The answers are a little mixed. For starters, many modern Tour players have never seen wedges with the kind of offset that Fowler and Woodland are playing.
“This visual hasn’t been a common request on its own,” Dill said. Jolly added that “it probably has limited use.”
Schomin sang a more optimistic tune.
“I think it is something that could end up back at retail,” he said. “We’ll see as time goes on, if it’s something that more guys want to adopt or want to test. You know, it seems to be working quite well for a couple of guys that we have using it right now.”
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Scottie Scheffler’s new Qi4D? It was his backup
Turns out the new Qi4D driver Scottie Scheffler put in the bag and won with last week in Memphis wasn’t so new to him.
Scheffler dominated last week’s gear headlines by finally switching to a new driver model after a nearly three-year-run with the TaylorMade Qi10. At his pre-tournament press conference on Wednesday, Scheffler revealed that the driver he switched to, a custom Qi4D with a glossy crown and bright blue face, was actually his current backup driver.
The motivation to switch was that he felt his Qi10 gamer was getting close to potentially being non-conforming if he was selected for a random CT test.
“I felt like my driver was going to get close to where, if it got tested again, it was going to get close to failing,” he said. “It had been in my bag for a long time, so I felt I needed to make sure the backup was in a good spot. The backup I was using was the Qi4D and I just put it put it in the bag a few times last week when I was playing at home … I liked what I saw, and so I figured I’d give it the old college try in Memphis and, yeah, it seemed to work out pretty well.”
Scheffler gained more than 2 strokes off the tee, finishing 13th in the field, on his way to the eight-shot win last week at the FedEx St. Jude.
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The World No. 1 said his testing had always shown the Qi4D to be faster and his stats back that up. Scheffler’s average ball speed in Memphis was his highest mark of the year at 181.66 mph, more than 3 mph above his season average of 178.44 mph.
The last time he averaged more than 180 mph off the tee was at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. That also happened to be the last event where he tested out the Qi4D driver.
Matt Fitzpatrick and J.J. Spaun try to rekindle major magic
What do Matt Fitzpatrick and J.J. Spaun have in common? Aside from both winning the U.S. Open in the past four years, they’re both returning to clubs that helped win them the Jack Nicklaus medal.
Spaun returned to his L.A.B. Golf DF3 putter — the same one he won this U.S. Open — after putting it in what he called a “two-month timeout.”
“Kind of like kids, like, you know, when they’re not behaving, you put them in timeout for a little bit and then they start listening better and cooperating. So I think it learned its lesson being in timeout,” he said Thursday.
Ever since we launched our first putter, Directed Force, golfers have been asking if we could make it less weird. DF3 is that putter. DF3 still does everything golfers love about the original. It stays square by itself. It’s still irrationally forgiving on mishits. But there’s a lot less to think about. The DF3 is entirely CNC milled from 6061 aluminum, with 8 screws on the bottom made of steel or tungsten in various densities to precisely target swing weight and lie angle balance each putter.
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