The Mexico Open at Vidanta – 2026 Preview

After a weather-shortened finish in Bermuda that saw Austin Smotherman win his second straight tournament, the PGA Tour heads south of the border for the Mexico Open. Dating back to 1944, the Mexico Open has quite a historical past and has been considered Mexico’s national championship. Located a few miles off the Pacific coast near the town of Puerto Vallarta, the Vidanta Vallarta Resort (one of the highest-rated hotels in Mexico) and its “Signature Course” designed by Greg Norman will host this event for the fifth time. Holes wind along the banks of the Ameca River and provide scenic views of the Sierra Madre mountains.

Through its first four editions at Vidanta Vallarta (2022–2025), the Mexico Open has gone from star winners to breakthrough winners. Jon Rahm won as a heavy favorite in 2022, edging Tony Finau, Brandon Wu and Kurt Kitayama by a stroke, and a year later Finau got revenge by three over Rahm. Since then, the event has produced first-time winners: Jake Knapp claimed his maiden Tour win in 2024, and Brian Campbell won in 2025 at 20-under in a playoff over Aldrich Potgieter.

Vidanta Vallarta rewards power. The Greg Norman design plays to 7,337 yards this year, roughly 120 yards shorter than in 2025, but it remains a long par-71. Its wide fairways and lack of penal rough still let bombers swing freely with little cost for a miss. Elite iron play, especially from over 200 yards, has been just as important. Rahm and Finau both hit 80 percent of their greens, and Knapp ranked first in the field in both SG: Approach and SG: Tee-to-Green, while past winners have rarely needed difficult up-and-downs. As at most oceanside resort courses, a proven record in coastal winds and comfort on the wall-to-wall Paspalum also go a long way. Scoring has been low, ranging from 17-under to Finau’s record of 24-under, and the shorter setup could push it lower still.

The Field

The 2026 VidantaWorld Mexico Open features a 120-player field headlined by Wyndham Clark, Ben Griffin, Tom Kim and defending champion Brian Campbell. The tournament returns to the fall portion of the PGA Tour schedule, with players competing at Vidanta Vallarta for a $6 million purse and 500 FedExCup points. Clark enters as one of the biggest names in the field following his 2026 U.S. Open victory, while Tony Finau returns to the site of his 2023 win.

The field also includes several established Tour winners, including Max Homa, Lucas Glover, Akshay Bhatia, Nico Echavarria and Nick Dunlap. Homa brings six career Tour victories, while Griffin, Bhatia and Echavarria have each established themselves as multiple winners. Rasmus Hojgaard adds international experience as a member of Europe’s victorious 2025 Ryder Cup team, and Corey Conners, Marco Penge and Harry Hall provide additional depth among the higher-ranked players. Rising prospects Blades Brown, Ryder Cowan and John Daly II also add youth and international interest to the field.

With the FedExCup Fall approaching its final stretch, the Mexico Open offers an important opportunity for players to improve their standings and strengthen their position heading into the 2027 season.

Finish Position and Strokes Gained History at Vidanta Vallarta (2022-2025)

Course Features

Tucked along the banks of the Ameca River, between the beaches of Nuevo Vallarta and the resort town of Puerto Vallarta, sits Greg Norman’s “Signature Course” at Vidanta Vallarta. The layout opened in 2015 and looks out on the Sierra Madre mountains, with Banderas Bay off to the southwest. Parota trees, native grasses and pockets of thick jungle frame most of the holes.

You won’t see a house or a storefront anywhere on the property. The course sits by itself on a quiet piece of tropical land, and players get there by crossing the Ameca on the world’s longest golf cart suspension bridge, which connects the states of Nayarit and Jalisco. As he did at TPC San Antonio and El Camaleón, Norman built the design around its natural setting: water, native plants, small changes in elevation and long views of the surrounding landscape. The land itself is fairly flat, but every one of those other elements shows up here.

As Norman said in his own words, “When designing this course, respecting and promoting the conservation of ecologically sensitive areas was of primary concern. As a result, routing was dictated by nature, according to dense vegetation corridors, streams, and wetlands.”

This year brings the biggest changes Vidanta has seen since the PGA Tour arrived in 2022. It’s the first time the event has been played in the fall, after two late April dates and two in February. The course was also reworked after Brian Campbell’s playoff win last year. The routing was shuffled so the 18th, 9th, 1st and 10th holes now sit closer together, and four holes were renovated. The par 4 4th was lengthened and turned into a slight right to left dogleg, with new fairway bunkers and a new green guarded by sand on the front right. New fairway bunkers on the par 5 8th give players more options off the tee and make it more of a risk and reward hole. The par 3 17th now plays in a stadium setting, and the par 4 18th has a new landing area between two lakes plus new greenside bunkers.

The official scorecard lists Vidanta Vallarta as a par 71 at 7,337 yards, about 120 yards shorter than last year. It still has an unusual makeup, with five par 3s, four par 5s and only nine par 4s. Even with the lost yardage, it’s a long walk. Six of the par 4s measure at least 455 yards, two of the par 3s go over 225, and all four par 5s are 548 yards or longer. That’s why roughly 35 percent of approach shots here have historically come from beyond 200 yards, nearly double the Tour average. Approaches also tend to finish a long way from the hole. Vidanta ranked first, second and third in proximity to the hole in its first three years on Tour.

Unlike most resort courses, the first four years of this tournament haven’t produced a birdie fest. The sample size is small, but the course sits near the middle of the pack for scoring difficulty. In 2024 it ranked 21st hardest out of 50 courses, with a scoring average of 70.07. Winning scores have ranged from Jon Rahm’s 17 under in 2022 to Tony Finau’s record 24 under in 2023. The one real breather is the drivable 297 yard par 4, which has been the easiest par 4 on the PGA Tour every season since the event began. It now plays as the 13th.

Along with its length, the coastal wind is one of the course’s main defenses. With the Pacific just down the road, crosswinds usually pick up around 11 a.m. on most days. Jon Rahm had this to say about the effects of the wind. “There’s a big difference between morning and afternoon. We had no wind for 13, 14 holes, and it was very scorable. Once the wind starts going 20-30 miles an hour, this golf course starts showing some teeth. It’s long. You have a couple really long par 4s. 4 and 8 are straight into the wind. Both of them 500 yards. So you can start seeing higher scores out there.” Rahm was talking about the original routing, so the hole numbers he mentions don’t match this year’s card.

There are also 12 holes with water in play (fifth most on Tour), 55 bunkers, several large sandy waste areas and patches of native vegetation that can cause trouble. The fairways are some of the widest on Tour at around 41 yards on average, and the greens are large, averaging about 7,000 square feet. The course is covered wall to wall in Platinum Paspalum, a turf common on coastal courses and known for its stickiness. Drives won’t roll out much on the fairways, and approach shots stop quickly on the greens. Around the putting surfaces, the grabby turf takes away most bump and run options, so players have to fly the ball onto the green and control their chips. The rough is kept at 2.5 inches. That’s up from 1.5 inches in the first two years, when the tournament was played in the spring.

Green speed is worth watching this week. Last year the greens were prepared to top out around 11 on the Stimpmeter, which is slow by Tour standards. For daily resort play, though, they run between 11.5 and 12, and Vidanta has said a few adjustments could get them to 13 for the tournament. The course closed about three weeks before the event to get it ready. As of late last week, the forecast called for a 60 percent chance of thunderstorms on Thursday and Friday, highs in the upper 80s and light wind around 7 mph all four days. If the storms do roll in, a softer course with little wind could lead to lower scores than we’ve seen in previous years.

Vidanta Correlations with SG: Total

Strokes Gained Analysis

 

Off the Tee

Off the tee, players will be met with wide landing areas on fairways that are perfect for bombers who love to hit a ton of drivers. And they do. Over the first four editions, the field pulled driver on 95% of par 4 and par 5 tee shots, the highest rate of any course in our database going back to 2015 and more than 20 points above the Tour average of about 73%. There are really only two holes where anyone clubs down. On the 459 yard par 4 that used to play as the 15th and now sits as the 9th, between a quarter and a third of the field has hit fairway wood each year. On the 475 yard par 4 that was the 10th and is now the 16th, roughly one in six players has gone with a wood or iron. Everywhere else, including the drivable 297 yard par 4, it’s driver out of the bag. Jonathan Byrd spoke about the “grip it and rip it” mentality here, saying, “When you’ve got so many tee shots where you can just let it go and swing as hard as you want. It kind of gives you plenty of room off the tee and the rough’s not bad, so it’s just kind of swing away.”

The results back that up. The field has averaged close to 298 yards on all drives at Vidanta, five to seven yards above the Tour average in each of the four years, and between 42 and 47 percent of drives have gone 300 plus, compared to about 40 percent across the Tour. Those tee shots matter more than usual because of what comes next. The average approach shot here has been 189 to 193 yards, the longest on the Tour in three of the four years and second longest in the other. Every extra yard off the tee turns a 5 iron into a 6 iron on a course where the field has hit only 71 to 75 percent of greens from the fairway, well below the Tour mark of about 77 percent.

Over the first few years, long hitters like Rahm, Finau, Alejandro Tosti, Aldrich Potgieter, and Patrick Rodgers have filled the top 10 of the leaderboard. Rahm led the 2022 field in driving distance at 340 yards, Knapp ranked second in 2024, and Finau was 11th in 2023. Strokes gained off the tee has been the second strongest predictor of finish here behind approach play, and raw distance has carried more weight than accuracy. Among players who made the cut over the four years, driving distance has correlated with total strokes gained at 0.27, while driving accuracy comes in at just 0.12. Brian Campbell is the exception that proves the rule. He ranked 72nd of 77 in distance at 294 yards during his 2025 playoff win over Potgieter, the longest hitter on Tour, and did it by ranking fifth in fairways hit and leaning on his wedges and short game. As Campbell put it afterward, “It’s impressive how far some of these guys hit it out here, and that’s just not me. I have to take my game elsewhere.”

Fairways here average 41 yards wide which makes them among the widest on Tour. While five holes present water danger off the tee, only two feature water that is tight to landing areas. Twelve holes have water somewhere on them, which ranks seventh most on Tour, but almost all of it comes into play on the approach rather than the drive. The field has hit 62 to 69 percent of fairways here, a few points better than the Tour average each year, and the number has climbed every year even after the rough was grown out to 2.5 inches in 2024. By 2025 the field was finding the rough on only 20 percent of tee shots, against nearly 30 percent across the Tour.

Missing a fairway just doesn’t cost much. The field has hit 54 to 58 percent of greens from off the fairway, which is four to six points better than the Tour average, and the birdie or better rate from the rough has run between 18 and 21 percent, top 10 on Tour in three of the four years and second best in 2025. On most courses the gap in green hit rate between fairway and rough is around 25 points. At Vidanta it’s closer to 17. Along with the rough being non-penal, the slower paspalum fairways will give a bonus to those with longer carry distance, since drives check up quickly and the ball has to get there in the air. Accuracy off the tee is very close to the Tour average but lacks importance with the rough posing little threat in past editions.

One note for this year. The course has been trimmed by about 120 yards and new fairway bunkers were added on a few holes, and the tees can still be moved back during the week. The width hasn’t changed, so expect the same driver heavy approach, just with slightly shorter clubs into the greens.

Approach

Whenever a course is easy to gain strokes off the tee and has expansive fairways combined with huge greens, it places a much stronger emphasis on the approach shot to the green. That is the exact setup at Vidanta Vallarta, where the paspalum greens average around 7,000 square feet and rank among the ten largest on Tour.

With this being such a lengthy track, 42% of approaches have been from over 200 yards since the course joined the schedule in 2022, compared with a Tour average of just 27.5%. Last year that number climbed to 44%, the highest rate of any Tour course. On the flip side, only 21% of approach shots are from inside 150 yards, the lowest share of any course on Tour over that stretch. This second shot length does lead to fewer quality scoring chances as the average proximity to the hole is almost 44 feet, which was the furthest distance on any course last year. Harry Higgs spoke to this last year. “You’re going to have to hit a lot of long irons really well and hit some lag putts well because long irons are hard to get close to the hole.”

Said Stephen Jaeger on approach play here, “I think this golf course requires a lot of shots between about 140 and 200. There’s not a lot of wedges out there unless you get some holes downwind or something. They’re big greens and you’ve got to put them in the right spots to have a good look.”

That middle window plays right around expectation, but the real test sits just beyond it. From 200 to 225 yards, the field has actually lost strokes per shot, the only range at Vidanta where that happens. Once players get past 225 yards the numbers swing back in their favor, mostly because those are par 5 second shots where even a miss on a huge green leaves a simple pitch. Those big putting surfaces also explain why the GIR rate of 66.8% sits right at the Tour average despite all the long irons.

When golfers can use wedges and short irons, Vidanta has been one of the easiest courses to gain on approach. The field picks up 0.041 strokes per shot from inside 150 yards here, nearly six times the Tour average, which ranks 11th of 72 courses since 2022. The catch is those looks simply don’t come around very often.

They will also have to take on six different greens that have water in the vicinity on approach. Since 2022, 1.07% of approaches have found the water compared with 0.71% on Tour. The par 5 14th is the worst offender, with 5.7% of approaches going wet. The 226 yard 17th is the hardest approach on the property, a par 3 where only 47% of the field finds the green and players lose 0.14 strokes per shot. The par 4 10th is no picnic either, with an average approach of 205 yards and a GIR rate of just 34%, the lowest of any hole.

And in typical Greg Norman style, sand traps line the fairways and most greens have at least two deep bunkers to deal with. It total there are 98 bunkers in play on the course. Interestingly, only 6.2% of approaches end up in a greenside bunker, below the Tour average of 7.2%, which speaks to just how much room the greens provide. So while the greens are larger than average, second shot accuracy will still be crucial, especially if coastal winds have an impact. Jon Rahm saw that firsthand on his way to the title in 2022. “We had no wind for 13, 14 holes. It’s very, very scorable,” Rahm said. “Once the wind starts going 20, 30 miles an hour, this golf course starts showing some teeth.”

Around the Green

Vidanta is among the easiest courses on Tour around the greens. Since the course joined the schedule in 2022, the field has gained 0.05 strokes per shot around the green, which ranks 7th easiest on Tour. Compare each player to their own short game everywhere else and Vidanta climbs to 3rd easiest. Some greens are elevated with collection areas behind them which eat up wayward approaches that are long. Players seem to know it, as only 29% of missed greens finish past the hole compared with 34% across the Tour, and the ones who do go long still get up and down about 65% of the time, right in line with the Tour average.

Because the ball tends to sit on top of the Paspalum turf blades combined with slower greens, less touch is needed when chipping which should make the short game much easier. The rough is where the course really gives back. Players have gained 0.09 strokes per chip from the rough at Vidanta, the 5th easiest mark of any course. Those chips finish an average of 10.5 feet from the hole compared with 11.6 feet elsewhere. The edge is smaller from short grass and the sand, but it’s still there, with the field gaining about 0.03 strokes per shot from both. Sand saves have trended up as well, climbing to 56.1% last year after sitting between 48.8% and 51.9% in the first three editions.

Even with all of that, the scrambling rate of 58% sits right at the Tour average and ranks 27th of 53 courses. The huge greens mean misses come from farther out, with the average chip starting 20.6 yards from the hole compared with 18.5 on Tour. More of those misses also land in the rough, as 36% of missed greens finish there compared with 25% on Tour, while only 40% stay on the short grass compared with 46%.

Putting

The greens played tough in the course’s debut in 2022, ranking 14th hardest of 36 courses in strokes gained putting, and the field made just 86.4% of putts from 3 to 5 feet, the 2nd lowest rate on Tour that season. Since then Vidanta has settled in as a middle of the pack putting course, ranking between 22nd and 26th each year, and over the full four years players have actually putted slightly better here than they do elsewhere. Inside 15 feet, the field has made 81.1% of its putts compared with 80.7% on Tour, and the 31.5% make rate from 10 to 15 feet sits above the Tour average as well.

The greens are Paspalum and run around 11 on the Stimpmeter, on the slower side for a Tour stop. While the greens don’t have any type of tiered or severe undulations, they do have some subtle sloping around many of the pin locations. Stephan Jaeger came away impressed with the surfaces during the 2025 event, saying “the greens are so good it’s nice to make some putts.”

Because of all the long approach shots along with the greens being among the largest on Tour at around 7,000 square feet, lag putting still matters. About 10% of putts come from 40 feet or longer, a touch above the 9.4% Tour average. Players have handled those long ones well, though. When they miss from 25 feet and beyond, they leave it an average of 3.1 feet, right in line with the Tour, and the 3 putt rate has dropped from 2.9% of holes in 2022 to 2.3% last year, well below the Tour average of 2.9%.

Paspalum greens tend to neutralize putting for both good and bad putters alike, and the data mostly backs that up. Over four years, the best putters in the field have kept only 46% of their usual edge over the worst putters at Vidanta, while the typical Tour course keeps about 74%.