Plodders Rejoice...A Review Of The 2012 U.S. Open Setup

The digital edition of Golf World has been emailed to subscribers and those of you mysteriously not subscribing should be able to read my story analyzing last week's setup of Olympic Club.

In my story I only included a few holes as examples, but here's the entire comparison of the non-one-shot holes and the "Fairways Hit" stats in 1998 compared to this year. You'll see that other than a few exceptions, the players hit far fewer fairways despite being armed with better equipment than in 1998.

Hole   '98% '12%
1         55    63
2         67    54
4         47    33
5         42    34
6         59    52
7         59    21    
9         45    34
10       63    52
11       57    55
12       55    44
14       69    51
16       69    51
17       62    40
18       64    61

Total    58.5    46

Green in regulation percentage for the field was virtually identical in 1998, 52.5% compared to 52% in 2012.