5 Facts About the Golf Ball Rollback You Can’t Argue

The changes that the USGA and R&A announced to the golf ball testing conditions include: 

• Updating clubhead speed from 120 mph to 125 mph
• Updating the spin rate from 2520 rpm to 2200 rpm
• Updating the launch angle from 10 degrees to 11 degrees
• Maintaining the current Overall Distance Standard of 317 yards (with a 3-yard tolerance)

A golf ball tested under the new standards must produce a distance of 317 yards or less (with a 3-yard tolerance) to be conforming.

Despite being announced in December of 2023, these changes don’t go into effect until 2028, and recreational golfers have an even longer grace period before they most adhere to the new guidelines, which brings us to our first fact.

Balls currently approved for conformance through 2027 can still be used by amateur golfers until 2030. So we’ve got the rest of this decade to hit the longest bombs of our lives without worrying about any rollback. You don’t need to stock up on balls or scour the black market for “juiced up” Pro V1s, not any time soon at least.

The USGA and R&A reported that more than 30% of today’s golf ball models are expected to conform to the updated standards without being changed. To translate that for the weekend warrior, if you find three balls in the woods, one of them probably already conforms to the new “rollback” standards.

The USGA and R&A noted that while the absolute longest hitters on planet Earth – the elite tour players who swing the club 120+ mph – should expect to see a 13-15 yard dropoffs in driving distance, players who don’t swing it as fast, won’t see as big of dropoffs. 

For comparison, LPGA Tour players, whose average drives are south of 260 yards, are expected to see a dropoff of about 5-7 yards. When we consider that the average male amateur averages 216 yards off the tee, their distances losses will be even less than the 5-7 yards that LPGA Tour players should expect.

Here’s a quick look at how the USGA and R&A expect the rollback to impact each caliber of player. If you compare your driving distance to one of these categories, you can figure out about how many yards you can expect to lose from the rollback. Distances are from the USGA’s distance report and PGA Tour statistics.

One of the arguments in favor of a rollback is that as players continue to hit the ball farther, courses become longer, rounds become slower, while scores remain the same. 

Theoretically, a rollback could reverse that trend, and if you’re uncomfortable playing from longer distances because of the distance lost from the rollback, you can simply tee it forward. You may find rounds to be a little quicker and your distances around the course, and your scores, to be quite similar to the pre-rollback days (which did we mention there are still six more years of?).

This “rollback” is technically an adjustmnet of the test standards used to determine whether a golf ball is conforming, and in this instance, the standard being updated is speed. However, the standards, which were first introduced in 1976, were updated in 1980, 2002, and 2004. As with this instance, the speed used in the testing standards was adjusted in 2004, meaning this is not an unprecedented change.

An announcement like the USGA and R&A’s rollback is bound to stir up some strong emotions. Golfers work hard for every yard, and don’t want some governing body taking those precious yards away. But we’re still many, many years from actually losing any yards, and just how many of those yards we lose remains to be seen, and we have several avenues to offset those losses when the time comes.