The Two Patterns Behind A Chunked Wedge

A short instruction piece on golf.com this week, written by Maddi MacClurg with Krista Dunton, makes a small claim that deserves more weight than it got. Dunton, a GOLF Top 100 Teacher, argues that most fat wedges trace back to one of two impact patterns. Either the leading edge digs sharply into the turf — deep divots, the occasional skull — which she calls too steep at impact. Or the bounce hits the ground first and skips into the ball, producing the weak, dribbly shot that everyone has hit and no one wants to talk about. That is too shallow.

Two patterns. Not twenty causes. Not a video full of drills. Two.

The reason this matters is that most amateurs treat a chunked wedge as a moment, a one-off, a feel that came and went. Dunton's framing reframes it as a signature. A pattern repeats. And a pattern that repeats can be measured.

Walk into any sim bay and the steep-at-impact wedge has a tell. Spin numbers climb past where they should — 12,000 rpm on a stock 56 is not finesse, it is the leading edge eating into the mat. Launch comes down. Carry holds steady but the dispersion widens. The dynamic loft sits lower than the static loft. None of that is hidden. It is just usually overlooked because most launch monitors show one number at a time, in one session at a time.

The shallow pattern looks different in the data. Spin drops below the expected range for a full wedge. Launch is fine, sometimes high. Smash factor is the giveaway — the ball never gets compressed because the club arrived flat, not down. On a session report this reads as benign. Across sessions, it reads as a leak.

Both of these are visible in launch monitor data long before they are visible in a divot pattern. That is the part of Dunton's piece worth sitting with. The fat wedge that ruined the par five last Sunday was almost certainly preceded by three sim sessions where the 56 was quietly drifting steep. The player did not know. The launch monitor did know, in the sense that the numbers were there. Nobody put them in a row.

This is where most golfers lose the plot. A round produces one data point. A sim session produces forty. The forty are the leading indicator. The one is the lagging indicator. By the time the chunked wedge happens on a Sunday, the pattern has been written into the practice data for weeks. PING's Proving Grounds work on launch and spin makes a similar point about the driver — that tour averages sit in a narrow band because tour players' impact patterns are stable, not because their swings are mechanical (Proving Grounds). Stability is the asset. The numbers are how you measure it.

The other reason Dunton's two-pattern framing is useful: it gives a golfer something to look for in the data without having to read a swing video. Most amateurs cannot tell, from feel alone, whether they were steep or shallow on a given strike. The bag tells them something happened. The numbers tell them which something. With the right comparison — this session versus the last ten, this club versus the others in the same family — the answer is usually visible in a glance.

There is a second-order observation here too. Dunton's piece focuses on wedges, but the same logic applies up the bag. Steep at impact on a 7-iron shows up as a spin spike and a thinned-looking launch. Hitting down on the driver — Schmidt's own running fight at -2 to -4 attack angle — costs roughly twenty yards of carry at 95 mph clubhead speed, per Golf Digest's robot testing. The signature changes by club. The principle does not. Impact patterns repeat. Repeating things can be tracked.

The closing point in the golf.com piece is the right one. Dunton tells the chunker to look at setup, weight, and rotation through impact rather than to add a band-aid swing thought. That is good coaching. It is also incomplete without the input the player rarely has — which of the two patterns am I, and is it getting better or worse? The feel does not answer that. The data does.

This is the kind of pattern The Cut is built to watch. The club-by-club breakdown view averages launch, spin, ball speed and smash factor for every club in the bag across rolling 30, 60, and 90-day windows, and surfaces a trend arrow when a club starts drifting against itself or against its neighbours. A 56 that is creeping steep gets flagged not because someone noticed, but because the numbers said so two sessions ago. The chat coach reads the same data and can name the pattern — Dunton's pattern, in this case — when a player asks why the wedges have gone cold. Not a band-aid. Not a generic tip. The actual signature, surfaced from the player's own sessions.

The fat wedge will still happen. It always does. But the next one should not be a surprise.

Sources: - Chunking your wedges? How to fix these 2 common causes — golf.com, May 21, 2026 - Optimal Launch and Spin — PING Proving Grounds - Is it really so bad to hit down on the ball with driver? — Golf Digest