The real winner at PGA National was PGA National

The Honda Classic provided one of the toughest events in a while, as the PGA National course presented Major-calibre challenges.

In the cold light of day Monday, the big winner at the Honda Classic was brutally obvious. It was PGA National.

Sungjae Im may have come away with the championship trophy, but the course dominated the field. You could see it in the way it treated the leaders down the closing stretch Sunday, all of them fumbling through the 72nd hole.

But you could more profoundly see it in the way PGA National sat on the entire field all week.

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Begin with Im’s winning score of six-under 274. Relative to par, it was the worst performance by a champion since Brooks Koepka claimed the 2018 U.S. Open championship at Erin Hills by posting a 1-over 281.

No Tour player had won a non-major with -6 in four years. The last to do that was Brandt Snedeker, champion of the 2016 Farmers Insurance Open.

And to find a winning score in a non-major worse than -6, you have to reach all the way back to the 2014 Quicken Loans, which was won by Justin Rose at -4.

Care to guess the average number of strokes under par by a PGA Tour winner so far during the 2019-20 season? It’s -16.8. Repeat: Im won at -6.

The four-round field average at PGA National was 283.44, 3.28 over par. That made the Honda the first PGA Tour event this season to conclude with an over-par four-round field average…and it did so by a large margin.

The previous high field average relative to par this season came at the Genesis Invitational two weeks ago at Riviera. The four-round field average there was 282.43, 1.57 strokes lower than the par 284.

Standing up against the field’s assault on par, PGA National beat Riviera by 4.85 strokes.

Year in and year out, only the major courses play as tough as PGA National did…and sometimes they can’t even hold the world’s best players that far over par. In 2019, only the PGA at Bethpage Black (+6.45) and the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach (+4.89) played rougher than PGA National based on the four-round field average.

By that standard, PGA National played tougher than either the British Open at Royal Portrush (+0.56) or the Masters at Augusta National (-3.00).