Rocket Classic

Tyler Rae spent last fall filling in a pond

It was the only water hazard on the golf course, sitting in front of the 14th green, and it had never belonged there. Donald Ross drew the North Course at Detroit Golf Club in October 1914. Robert Trent Jones came through in the 1950s, took out bunkers, planted trees, and added the pond. Rae, working from Ross's original plans, put the bunkers back (84 of them became 91), took the trees out, and filled the pond with fescue.

The check came out to $16.1 million. It's now a par 70 course instead of 72 measuring 7,328 yards, and the two short par 5s that drove much of the scoring in this tournament are now long par 4s, which could consequently be two of the tougher holes on the course this week at their length.

This will also be the last Rocket Classic. Rocket Companies declined its option for 2027, ending a title sponsorship that has run since 2019 and cost the company north of $100 million. Tournament director Mark Hollis put the exit down to two words, optionality and certainty: at roughly $15 million a year the money was not the issue, but the tournament could never be sure which dates it would draw, and dates determine the field, the crowd and the rating.

Just this morning the Tour named the replacement, and it is not in Detroit. The insurance company Sompo will sponsor a full-field event at Silverado Resort in Napa from July 29 to August 1, 2027 — same dates, on the other coast. In 2028 it becomes one of the new Championship Series events and moves again, to a market the Tour has not yet named. The expansion markets Brian Rolapp named in March were New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington and Boston. Detroit was not among them.

Three players who have won this tournament came back to play it out. Rickie Fowler took the 2023 playoff. Tony Finau still holds the scoring record at −26. And Cam Davis, the only two-time champion, and an unlikely one at that, won in 2021 and again in 2024. His second win came without a single top-10 anywhere else that season, which tells you how precisely this one golf course fit him. He likely was not a proponent of any course renovations.

PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ carries featured groups all four days.

The birdie-fest was built on par 5s. There are two left.

In past years, missing the fairway at Detroit Golf Club was mostly a non-issue. Only 13.3% of the strokes gained at this event came off the tee last year, against a Tour average of 15.3%, and the course ranked 36th of 38 in off-the-tee difficulty. Fairways were about tour-average width and the miss was barely punished. Players pulled driver on 86% of their tee shots against a Tour average of 69.8%, and averaged 301.7 yards, fifth-longest of the 40 courses DataGolf tracks. It almost never mattered who hit them.

That is the part most likely to have changed. Golf Digest contributor Ron Klos walked the front nine this week and shared some notes. Among them:

• A five-foot-deep drainage ditch now runs the entire right side of the second hole, which also plays 41 yards longer.
• Two large bunkers pinch the fourth fairway between 280 and 320, squarely in the landing zone.
• The first green sits elevated and ringed by runoffs and shaved collection areas.

None of that appears in last year's strokes-gained numbers, because none of it was there.

The separation comes with the second shot and the putter. The greens were rebuilt to Ross's original contours, growing from roughly 5,200 square feet on average to 6,700 and recovering pin positions the club had lost over decades. They are pure bentgrass now, no Poa in them yet, and they should run about 12½ on the Stimpmeter — new bentgrass tends to play springy and repel an approach through its first season. In 2019 every player who finished inside the top 20 gained strokes putting. One read on that is this tournament is a conversion contest, decided by whoever runs hot from eight-plus feet.

The strokes-gained record does not really support it. Winners here have separated by enormous margins across the whole bag. Finau gained 18.6 strokes on the field in 2022, Lashley 17.3 in 2019, Fowler 15.4 in 2023. Nobody has putted their way into this trophy from nowhere. Flat greens gave good iron players a way to cash what they had already created.

Rae's work does not change the putting surfaces so much as it changes what you are holding when you approach them. Six par 4s now measure 470 yards or longer: the 2nd, 6th, 7th, 12th, 17th and 18th. The 11th is a 246-yard par 3. That is a third of the golf course asking for a long iron, on a property that used to ask for a wedge.

Two of the bigger changes do not appear on the scorecard at all. The third hole is no longer the third hole — the routing now borrows the South Course's opening hole, which makes this officially a composite course. And on the seventh, the seventy-foot tree that guarded the left side of the approach has been taken down, the green has moved well right of where it sat, and the old green is now a bailout area.

The 3M Open Scorecard

Par+ weights market pricing and current form most heavily, and the 3M rewarded exactly one of those reads. Scheffler ranked first and finished second, which is the model doing its job on the one player nobody needed help identifying. Hideki Matsuyama at 15th and Ben Kohles at 12th both landed inside the top ten. Below that it thinned out fast: three of the top ten missed the cut, and only one of the top five finished inside the actual top five. Koivun ranked 37th on 27 percent stat coverage, which is less a miss than an admission. Two professional starts is not enough history for any composite to read.

This Week's Model Picks

Every course-fit model in golf, ours included, started this week with a handicap: the venue in the historical record is not the venue being played. Ours had Detroit filed as a putter's course, which it was for seven years and is not anymore. We rebuilt that input as a ball-striker's test before running the numbers below. It is a judgment call and you should know we made it.

So the useful question is narrower than usual. Not who has played well here, but who is good at the specific thing the new holes ask for: a long iron or a fairway wood into a Ross green, twice a round, on holes where par is now a fine score. That profile favors ball-strikers over the aggressive putters this tournament has historically rewarded.

A few notes:

• Cameron Young (#1) — 1.23 strokes better than field expectation, and the market agrees at +1025. He grades first in the field for course fit under the new classification, and he won last year’s Wyndham at Sedgefield, the Ross design closest to this one and, conveniently, next week’s stop.
• Wyndham Clark (#5) — grades above average both as a ball-striker and around the greens, a rare combination on a card where most of the top names are lopsided.
• Jackson Koivun (#7) — into our top ten for the first time, and rightly so. He put on a show last week, a well-rounded game with the mindset to match. His course-fit sample is not included, so recent form alone is pushing him up the board.
• Xander Schauffele (#8) — the clearest disagreement on the board. Second in the market at +1650 and eighth with us. His strokes gained approaching over the last 24 rounds is negative and his current-form score is the lowest of anyone in our top ten. Whatever the restored course rewards, that is not it.
• Hideki Matsuyama (#10) — closes the top ten on the strength of his T3 at the 3M, though his course fit is the weakest of anyone inside it.

The argument going around this week is that Ross greens produce putting contests regardless of par 70 or 72, with East Lake and Sedgefield offered as the evidence, and that the restoration changes the winning number without changing the skill that produces it. That may well be right and we may be wrong. The only counter worth making is that a 246-yard par 3 and six par 4s over 470 yards do not much care how good the greens are.

Three players outside our Par+ top ten with a real path to Sunday.

The four easiest holes were the four par 5s

Rank all eighteen holes at Detroit Golf Club by 2025 scoring average and the top of the list comes back in a block: the 7th, the 17th, the 14th, the 4th. Every par 5 on the property, in the first four positions, with nothing else close. The 7th played to 4.388, the 17th to 4.415. The 17th alone gave up sixteen eagles last year and not one double bogey.

Two of those four are gone. The 7th is a 505-yard par 4 now, its green moved well right of where it used to sit, the big tree that framed the old approach taken out. The 17th plays 537.

That is the entire restoration compressed into a scoring table. The reputation this tournament built — 22 under to win, seven straight champions at 18 under or better — was never really about short yardage or flat greens. It was about four holes where a good player expected to make 4, two of them reachable with an iron.

Take half of that away and the arithmetic moves twice. Eight strokes of par disappear over 72 holes. And the two best scoring chances in the rotation become the two holes most likely to hand a shot back on Sunday afternoon. The 17th in particular now sits exactly where it will decide something. A 537-yard par 4, second to last, holding a one-shot lead, is a different proposition than a par 5 you can get home in two.

The winner profile points the same direction. Five of the last six champions here finished inside the top 11 for strokes gained approaching, and three of the last four ranked top 20 in proximity. What moves is the birdie math. Every winner in the last six editions made at least 23 of them, four with an eagle on top. Against a par 70 with the two easiest scoring holes converted, something closer to 18 should be enough.

The front half of the week is settled. Thursday and Friday come in hot and dry, highs in the mid-80s and effectively no rain in the daytime forecast. That is the firm end of the range, and it is the version where the two converted par 4s bite hardest. Whatever this golf course is going to be, the field finds out before the cut.

The weekend is less certain. Forecasts split badly on Sunday — somewhere between 74 and 82 degrees, with rain chances running from almost nothing to forty percent. That gap matters more than it looks. Soft bentgrass hands the field back some of what Rae just took away, because a receptive green makes a 4-iron behave like a wedge. A wet Sunday and the restored course gets the last word taken out of its mouth. Both weekend rounds carry storm risk, and if it arrives the gusts will matter more than the average wind.

Each week, a bird native to the tournament's corner of the country.

Kirtland's Warbler  ·  Setophaga kirtlandii

We were due for a good Warbler. Michigan's rarest songbird nests almost nowhere else on earth: 98% of the world's population breeds in a ten-county corridor around Grayling, on the ground, under jack pine still low enough to hide a nest. The habitat for these picky nesters used to be born out of wildfire, and a century of suppressing fires nearly killed off the species — 167 breeding pairs left by 1974. The recovery worked by faking it, clear-cutting mature stands and planting 1.8 million seedlings a year, and in 2019 these resilient lil guys became the first songbird ever removed from the endangered list. But the 2025 census counted 1,489 pairs, down 34% in four years. A second revival effort may be needed.

Range  Breeds in northern Lower Michigan; winters in the Bahamas Habitat  Dense young jack pine, nesting on the ground