Jim Kennedy,
First, we like the concept of playing by USGA rules.
Second, when we did the math on each member of a foursome taking a mulligan it was astounding as to the additional time required for the entire field.
It added at LEAST an additional two minutes per foursome.
And, that doesn't take into account the time to retreive the other ball.
That would be at LEAST an additional 20 minutes for every ten foursomes.
If the first foursomes were off at 8:00 am, by noon you'd be about an hour behind, by 3:00pm about two hours behind.
At a public course, each hour represents about 8 foursomes or 32 players. At greensfees of $ 100, that's $ 3,200 of lost revenue for an hour's delay, $ 6,400 for two hours, not to mention the loss of collateral revenue in the proshop, range, and restaurants.
We studied this for about a year and a half, which included reviewing data for the previous three years.
In the first year of implementation, rounds went from about
5:00 to 4:05.
We were satisfied with the results and so were 99 % of the members.
The chronicly slow players, and there are about a dozen of them, are rarely happy with a reasonable pace of play, but, I'd rather have 99 % of the membership happy.