Brandel Chamblee has given a damning assessment of Jordan Spieth's recent swing changes, saying the three-time major winner is "roughly half the player he used to be."
This comes following a video posted by the PGA Tour which showed Spieth going through a series of very deliberate and uncomfortable-looking swing rehearsals on the range at Austin Country Club ahead of last week's WGC Dell Technologies Match Play.
Chamblee, a Golf Channel analyst, was asked to weigh in on the matter via Twitter, and as usual, didn't hold back.
"It’s hard to explain that move, other than by saying that it’s allowed him to dig his way out of a slump, to become roughly half the player he used to be," he wrote. "If you want to thwart or hobble a genius athlete all one needs to do is getting them thinking about their action."
It had appeared that Spieth was back to something like his best with a win at last year's Valero Texas Open after a barren spell that nearly saw him fall outside the world's top 100 following his 2017 Open Championship triumph. A best major finish in four years at the 2021 Open at Royal St George's seemed further evidence of a player on the rise.
However, he has shocked fans and pundits in 2022 with a swing that betrays the fluent motion he dazzled the golfing world with when he burst onto the scene in 2014.
Spieth began his Valero Texas Open defence with an uneventful and disappointing level-par 72 that has him seven shots off the early pace. It's the last event before the Masters next week so he'll be desperate to head to Augusta National relying on more than just course expertise.
So far in 2022, a second-place finish at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am is the outlier among a fairly dismal run of results that includes a missed cut at The Players Championship and a group stage exit at the WGC Match Play.
