I agree Mucci's method can work. If our only real concern with it is a player "blowing up" on 18, hitting one OB and then a few into the water to be unable to finish within the 10 minute limit, then I doubt the stroke penalty makes too much of a difference to him anyway. Personally, I'd be fine with some common sense selective enforcement in the case of someone making a 12 on the last hole anyways. It's pretty easy to differentiate between slow play and poor play that takes a lot of time.
The stroke penalty doesn't matter to the guy who made the 12, but it matters to the guy(s) in his group who are also penalized (unfairly, in my opinion). The problem with selective enforcement is that it's selective. If it's sometimes OK to not technically follow the rule, then before long it will ALWAYS be OK to not technically follow the rule. Once you start applying the rule sometimes, but not other times, then it ceases being a fair rule. There are all kinds of things that happens in tournaments where a player breaks a rule and receives no benefit. But we still penalize those guys. We don't say "we'll let it go this time because it didn't have an impact" or "we understand what happened and it didn't violate the spirit of the rule". If a rule is broken, you get penalized.
I get that Bill. But you're getting at the heart of why slow play rules are difficult to enforce.
The rules of golf have pace of play rules: Be ready to play, keep up with the group in front, no more than 5 minutes to search for a lost ball. The committee can determine pace of play guidelines for an event.
The rule we're discussing is an additional rule which would have to be implemented by a committee to enforce the rules already on the books.
The problem is that my group might keep pace for 17 holes and I'm two strokes clear in a tournament. I pull my tee shot near a hospitality tent. In accordance with the rules of golf for keeping pace of play, I hit a provisional.
I spend four of my allotted five minutes finding my first ball, locate it, and hit another poor shot. But I get my third onto the green, and my playing partners putt out because they're playing ready golf. I hole my final putt. Celebration ensues, and then... we realize that I holed my putt 10:30 after the last group finished. I get docked a stroke because of a committee rule designed to enforce rules already on the books for pace of play, which I followed to a t.
Now, that may be exactly how this policy is supposed to work, but if so, it's stupid. And if the goal is to improve watchability of the Tour, it just failed. We've seen in the last 15 years how frequently people hit awful shots on the 18th hole of a major. A rule like this would ABSOLUTELY decide the fate of a major championship someday, and when that happens golf will lose a ton of viewers.
You have to give the committee some discretion if it implements a rule designed to enforce a rule, or not have the rule at all. The better method for the Tour would be to just ENFORCE the rules they already have. There's nothing wrong with putting someone on the clock and hitting them with a penalty two holes later. The problem is that it's not enforced.