I post this for those of you that enjoy learning some of the less obvious rules about golf and the handicap system. I exchanged a few emails with Gary Donat about my slope question. Gary is the Director of Course rating for the FSGA and was very responsive and helpful.
Turns out that once again Alan was wrong
. It is indeed possible that the slope rating of forward tees can be higher than back tees. This text is from an email Gary sent me.
First slope is the difference of the Course Rating (scratch Rating) and the Bogey Rating multiplied by 5.381.
So let’s look at the Gold tee ratings, Course rating is 70.9 and the Bogey rating is 96.7 giving us a difference of 25.8 multiply that by 5.381 and rounding to the nearest whole number we get 139.
Black tee Course rating is 72.9 and the Bogey rating is 98.4, giving us a difference of 25.5. Multiply that by 5.381 we get 137, of course rounding to the nearest whole number.
Let’s look at Course ratings between the two tees we see the course rating went up 2 strokes from Gold to Black but the bogey rating between the 2 tees only 1.7 strokes. Well how can this be?
In the USGA course rating system, the bogey golfer hits his drive a 200 yards and hits his subsequent shots a maximum of 170 yards. So let say I had a set of tees that forced the bogey golfer to hit long approach shots to the greens, this would bump up all of the numbers for the bogey golfer for this set of tees thus increasing the bogey rating and also increasing the difference between the Scratch and Bogey rating . Now let’s say I have a set of tees has the Bogey golfer hitting essentially chip shot approaches to the green. This lowers the bogey rating and decreases the difference between the Scratch and Bogey rating. Now the difference in yardage will bump up both the Scratch and Bogey rating but because of these shorter approach shots we can have a lower slope on a longer set of tees.
In addition he sent me this text which explains further:
At times, a golfer playing from a back set of tees cannot hit the ball far enough to reach difficult obstacles (e.g., bunkers, water hazards, trees, OB, etc). Therefore, that golfer will not need as many handicap strokes to equal the course rating.
And finally this link.....
http://www.ncga.org/2007/06/18/an-explanation-of-slope/