The 2026 rules changes were written for guys who have a referee

Shane Lowry moved his ball with a practice swing at Portrush last year, swore he never saw it happen, and got two shots for it anyway. He called the penalty hard to take and then took it, because arguing about it on a Friday afternoon is how you end up trending.

That one got fixed in January. If a player genuinely had no idea the ball moved, it's one stroke now instead of two, and he hasn't played from a wrong place. Steve Rintoul, who runs rules and officiating at the Tour, told GOLF.com the old outcome just didn't feel right: "He's getting penalized with two strokes for something he didn't really even know he'd done."

Fine. Sensible. Most of the coverage stopped there and called the whole 2026 batch common sense.

Then I read the actual R&A text and the thing that jumped out is who these rules are for.

Read the italics

Take the pitch-mark rule, the one everybody liked. You've been hosed by this. Perfect drive, dead center, and the ball settles into a crater some guy left forty minutes ago and never fixed. Under the old rule you got nothing, because relief only applied to a pitch mark you made yourself.

Now there's an option to give you free relief from anyone's unrepaired pitch mark in a closely mown area. Great.

Except the R&A put this in italics, which they don't usually bother doing: "This Local Rule option is only for use in competitions where there is live television coverage and where there are referees present to make this determination." A referee has to be the one who decides it's an unrepaired pitch mark and not, say, an old one that a mower rolled over.

The unaware-ball-movement rule has the same gate. It's meant for televised events where a video referee couldn't get to the player in time. Internal out of bounds and the expanded relief near greens both require a Committee to put a Local Rule in place. The damaged-club component rule the R&A flatly says is not intended for club level.

None of these are changes to the Rules of Golf, by the way. The next actual edition lands 1 January 2028. These are Model Local Rules, meaning they do nothing at all unless somebody in charge of your competition turns them on.

So five of the six need infrastructure your Saturday game does not have.

The one that does reach you goes the other way

The sixth is preferred lies, and the Tour didn't expand it. They shrank it. The relief area went from a club-length, about 46 inches, down to a scorecard length, about 11 inches. Rintoul said the players pushed for it, because 46 inches each direction let a guy change the grain on a Bermuda chip and get the ball up on the collar, and that stopped feeling like the point. For what it's worth, preferred lies were only in play in 21 rounds all of last season.

Eleven inches. That's my flat opinion on winter rules settled, honestly: if your club plays lift-clean-and-place, use your scorecard. It's what the best players in the world now get, it's more honest than the club-length everyone has been quietly stretching for years, and I say this as someone who has absolutely used the full driver-length version of that measurement in a scramble and felt no guilt about it at the time.

Where your strokes actually are

Here's the part that bugs me about how much airtime bad-lie rulings get.

Mark Broadie's finding, which Shot Scope's data held up when Practical Golf ran the numbers, is that the long game explains roughly two thirds of the scoring difference between any two golfers, and it holds at every level, not just on Tour. Approach shots are the single biggest bucket.

Then look at Lou Stagner's Arccos work. For a 15-handicap, the swing between hitting half your greens and hitting almost none is about eight strokes a round. Hitting every fairway in a round, versus hitting very few, is worth about three.

Eight versus three. And the fairway is the place we spend all our emotional energy defending.

That is the whole argument in a sentence. The lie you got hosed on is a rounding error next to the fact that your 8-iron came out 14 yards short and 20 right of where you aimed it, and did the same thing three holes later, and you don't know why because nobody ever told you.

What I'd actually rather know

That's the read I keep coming back to whenever a rules story goes big. The rules moved a little, in a direction that helps roughly forty people per week, and the rest of us went and argued about it in the parking lot instead of looking at the thing costing us six shots.

What I don't know, and I'll be upfront that I haven't found data on it, is how often an amateur genuinely does land in an unrepaired pitch mark in the fairway. Feels rare. Feels rarer than the number of times I've complained about it. If someone has a real frequency number from a shot-tracking dataset I'd honestly like to see it, because my gut says it's under one round in ten and my gut has been wrong about golf plenty.

The reason I built Mully to read your launch monitor exports and your round data together is that the pattern is sitting right there and nobody looks at it. Anyone can tell you you're a 14 and should work on your irons. What I want on the screen is that your 7-iron strike moved toward the heel over your last four sessions, your carry dropped 9 yards with it, and that's why you're short-siding yourself right. Then today's Practice Station gives you a named drill for it, and tomorrow's adapts based on whether that drill actually did anything.

Rules are the fun argument. The eight strokes are the real one.