2026 World Wide Technology Championship at El Cardonal at Diamante – Preview

The PGA Tour wraps up its two-week Mexico swing this week at El Cardonal at Diamante in Los Cabos for the World Wide Technology Championship. Fresh off the VidantaWorld Mexico Open in Nuevo Vallarta, the Tour heads west across the Gulf of California to the tip of the Baja Peninsula for the 20th edition of this event and its fourth straight year at El Cardonal.

Opened in 2014, El Cardonal sits on 225 acres in the desert foothills above the Pacific and was the first course designed by 82-time PGA Tour winner Tiger Woods. He drew on the Golden Age layouts he grew up playing in Southern California, and it shows. Most holes give you more than one way to get to the green, so the course asks players to pick a line and commit to it rather than simply overpower it.

Diamante is a private resort at the southern tip of Baja California Sur, with Pacific views from nearly every hole. El Cardonal plays second fiddle there to the Dunes Course, the Davis Love III design that gets the magazine rankings. The World Wide Technology Championship spent its first 16 years at El Camaleon in Mayakoba, south of Cancun, before moving to Los Cabos in 2023.

With wide fairways, bunkering that’s more about positioning than punishment, and some of the largest, most contoured greens the Tour sees all year, El Cardonal is a resort course through and through, and the scoring reflects it. Erik van Rooyen won at -27 in 2023, Austin Eckroat went -24 in 2024, and last year Ben Griffin closed with a Sunday 63 to get to -29, two clear of Sami Valimaki and Chad Ramey.

The wind is the only real defense, and since most holes run north and south, it usually blows across the fairways instead of into the players’ faces. Between the breeze and the arroyos, a few shots will go missing, but the winner should still land somewhere in the mid-to-high 20s under par.

The Field

The World Wide Technology Championship doesn’t have the star power it had a year ago, but it still has a defending champion worth watching. Ben Griffin comes back to El Cardonal fresh off a T4 at Vidanta and looking to defend a title he won by two shots. He’s one of just two players in the field ranked inside the top 30 in the world, along with Ryan Gerard at No. 23. From there, the list of top-60 players runs only five deep once you add Marco Penge, Keith Mitchell, and Jackson Koivun.

There’s a strong crop of young talent in Los Cabos too with Koivun headlining the group. The 21-year-old turned pro after the U.S. Open, won the 3M Open in just his third start while holding off Scottie Scheffler on Sunday, and played his way onto the Presidents Cup team before the fall even started. Blades Brown is only 19 but already has a third at Puerto Rico and a handful of top-10s that earned him special temporary membership. Ben James, the top player out of this year’s PGA Tour University class, has contended several times since turning pro in June and sits 61st in the FedExCup, one spot outside the Aon Next 10. Beyond those names, the most recognizable faces include Harry Hall, Mackenzie Hughes, Nick Taylor, Billy Horschel, Tony Finau, Max Greyserman, and 2024 winner Austin Eckroat.

This is the sixth of eight fall events, which leaves three weeks to get inside the top 100 and keep a full card for next season. Greyserman’s T11 in Mexico pushed him up to 96th, and Kristoffer Ventura’s runner-up finish moved him 32 spots to 76th, which knocked Taylor Pendrith (102) and Brandt Snedeker (103) outside the line. Of the players teeing it up this week, David Lipsky (94), John Parry (95), Greyserman (96), Horschel (97), Kevin Yu (98), and Chandler Phillips (99) are holding on to the last few cards, while Hughes (101), Pendrith (102), A.J. Ewart (104), Lee Hodges (105), and Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen (106) are all one good week from getting back inside. With 500 points to the winner and a course that gives up birdies by the bushel, the standings could look very different by Sunday night.

Finish Position and Strokes Gained History at El Cardonal at Diamante (2023-2025)

Course Features

Named for the cardón, the tall, multi-armed cactus native to the Baja California peninsula, El Cardonal at Diamante is a par 72 that stretches to 7,452 yards from the championship tees. That length ranks 15th among the courses on this season’s PGA Tour schedule, but the defining measurement here is width. Fairways average 60 yards across, the widest of any venue the Tour has played in the past decade with the exception of the Old Course at St. Andrews. Driver is in play on every par 4 and par 5, and there is rarely a reason to leave it in the bag.

The scale of the property matches the scale of the fairways. The land falls more than 240 feet over the mile-long stretch from the 17th tee to the third fairway, and from the higher points on the course the Pacific is in view in nearly every direction. Palo verde trees, cacti, and native desert flora frame the corridors between holes, giving El Cardonal a sense of openness that few Tour venues can match.

Before getting into the numbers, one caveat is worth stating. El Cardonal has now hosted three editions of this event, but it has never been a ShotLink course, so there is no strokes gained data to draw from. What we do have are the traditional measures, such as fairways hit, greens in regulation, scrambling, and putting, and together they paint a clear picture. The course has averaged 2.62 strokes under par per round, the third easiest figure on Tour, and the three winning scores have been 27, 24, and 29 under. In the 2025 season rankings, El Cardonal had the easiest fairways to hit on Tour at 88.9%, the second easiest greens at 76.2%, and the fifth toughest scrambling. It also ranked third in both three-putt percentage (4.24%) and putts per round (30.14).

Metric Correlations with SG: Total

Off the tee, the defense is supposed to come from desert arroyos, native dunes, and fairway bunkers that sit in the landing zones. An arroyo is a dry, steep-sided sandy wash that only carries water after a heavy rain, and it’s a close cousin to the barrancas that cut through Los Angeles Country Club, site of the 2023 U.S. Open. Several fairways are routed along or across them. With no rough anywhere on the property and only one hole with water, the arroyos and the sand are about all that stands between a player and the green. Through three editions the fairway rate is 90.5%, so most of the field has found a way around them. Tiger Woods built the width in on purpose, and he explained the thinking this way:

“I set up the golf strategy to make golfers think and make choices. Regardless of your handicap, there are going to be different ways to play every hole. Angles of approach are going to be very important and will dictate the type of shots you should consider. I love this kind of golf.”

He also said, “El Cardonal is going to remind people of the old-style California courses.” The choices are real. On most holes a player can take on an arroyo or a bunker to shorten the approach and open the angle, or bail to the safe side and hit a longer club in. Given how many fairways are being hit, the longer club hasn’t hurt much. The GIR rate sits at 81.1%, the highest of any course on Tour.

What keeps this from being a complete pushover is the wind and the greens. The breeze usually comes off the Pacific out of the north, but it can flip and gust from the south in a matter of minutes, and a few holes (the fourth and the ninth in particular) play straight into it. Light conditions in 2025 produced three 61s in one week, from Sami Valimaki and Nick Dunlap on Thursday and Garrick Higgo on Saturday, all matching the course record. When it blew in 2024, the first round was the only one in three years where the field finished over par.

The greens are the other half of the defense. They average 8,300 square feet, second largest on Tour behind only the Plantation Course at Kapalua, and they come in shapes you don’t see very often. The eighth is T-shaped, the sixth is an M-shaped double green split by a central bunker, and the 16th and 18th are three-tiered. The size gives the Tour an endless supply of pin positions, and the result is a lot of 40- and 50-footers. That’s why three-putt avoidance ranks as difficult here despite greens that are otherwise easy to hit, and why players are averaging 1.735 putts per green in regulation. Lag putting is probably the single most important skill on the property. Players only miss about one green in five, but when they do, the scrambling rate of 54.7% is well below the Tour average, mostly because chipping from tight paspalum into a green the size of a parking lot leaves plenty of room to get it wrong.

For agronomy, it’s wall-to-wall Platinum paspalum, the standard for coastal resort courses in this part of the world. There are seven acres of fairway, and the dry, windy climate keeps them firm and running. Paspalum tends to sit the ball up nicely on short grass, which helps the approach numbers, and it rolls true on the greens, which were set at around 11.5 on the stimpmeter. There’s no rough at all, not even around the greens, so players have every option available when they miss, from putter to lob wedge.

The routing runs through dune-framed holes on the front and over the arroyos on the back, and it opens and closes with two downhill par 5s that give up birdies and eagles all week. Woods always feasted on par 5s, so it’s no surprise that all four here are reachable. The first two holes play downhill, and the drivable 351-yard third sits on flat ground at the lowest point of the property. From there the course climbs: the 483-yard fourth rises 30 feet from tee to green, and the 601-yard par-5 sixth goes up another 70 feet before the 489-yard seventh tumbles 60 feet back down. The back nine is a run of switchbacks from the 10th through the 14th, with the drivable 344-yard 10th and the 154-yard 16th, the shortest par 3, offering two more clear birdie chances. The 17th tees off from the highest point on the course, and the 585-yard 18th drops more than 60 feet to a narrow green that produces everything from eagle to double.