What We Tried

Titleist T150 Irons. The slightly stronger-lofted player’s cavity-back iron in the new Titleist T-Series lineup.

Your Titleist T150 Tester

Chris Nickel. MyGolfSpy Director of Business Development who is only asking for an iron that looks and feels like a muscle-back but plays with cavity-back levels of forgiveness. Is that really too much to ask?

Context and Primer

Sometimes in a club fitting, you end up where you were expected to but not necessarily for the anticipated reasons. It’s both the journey and destination, people. That serves as your synopsis of my Titleist T-Series iron fitting experience.

Generally, I’m a “player’s CB” sort of golfer who isn’t opposed to a bit more (or less) forgiveness as needed. I don’t have trouble generating a reasonable amount of ball speed (7-iron is +/- 120 mph) or height. If anything, I often end up with a 44-degree pitching wedge in order to produce a playable combination of trajectory and spin. This is the result of adding loft at impact, which is something I’m working to mitigate.

Also, for every golfer, there comes a point in the setup where you no longer have the swing speed to generate enough height and spin to justify a cavity-back or muscle-back iron. To toss out a juicy stat, more than 75 percent of Titleist tour professionals play at least two different iron models.

Titleist’s 3D (Distance Control, Descent, Dispersion) fitting approach offers a straightforward fitting template. Though, in my case, the focus was two-fold. First, find the optimal 7-iron head-shaft combination and then determine if/when I could benefit from a model with additional launch, ball speed and forgiveness.

About The Titleist T150 Irons

If you’d like the full rundown on all Titleist T-Series irons, we have it for you. That aside, the Cliffs Notes version is that the T150 is a lot like the T100, but with a bit more juice.  The previous generation T100 iron was the most-played model on worldwide professional tours.

Beyond that, the T100 serves as Titleist’s quintessential “tour” iron. What this means is that the T100 is Titleist’s best answer for touring professionals and elite amateurs who are seeking a muscle-back profile with cavity-back levels of forgiveness inside a multi-material, modern iron design.

The T150 is a slightly more forgiving, marginally larger and stronger lofted (44-degree PW in the T150 versus  46 in the T100) as compared to the T100. Fun side note: Titleist engineers developed a formula to quantify the difference between the T100 and T150 irons. If the T100 equals a baseline index of 100, the T150 came out to 149-point-something. So, round it up and you get the T150.

Titleist T150 On The Monitor

Like AJR requested, “Can we skip to the good part?” Sure, why not.

As you’ve likely surmised, I ended up in a set of Titleist T150 irons. But wait! There’s more!

Instead of the T150 5-iron, I ended up with the T200 5-iron. And the reasoning is likely exactly what you’re thinking. Trust me, we’ll get there.

I’ve worked with my TPI fitter (also named Chris) several times so he had a good handle as to where we should start. Previously, he fitted me into the Titleist T100S with Dynamic Gold DG X100 120 shafts. So, if it ain’t broke …

This time, we jumped right into a T100 versus T150 comparison, again with the same shaft set up (still DG X100 120).  Ultimately, the T150 generated more optimal launch conditions, specifically peak height, which is the key determining factor in descent angle.

Given reasonable trajectory and spin, ball speed is the best proxy for distance. With both irons, I hovered right around 120 mph. Dispersion can also be thought of as the consistency of distance and direction. In my case, neither the T100 nor T150 presented a clear advantage, both in terms of left-to-right and front-to-back dispersion. Again, that left descent angle as the primary decision point between the T100 and T150.

As with every fitting metric, there are acceptable targets and ranges, not absolutes. If you’re Cameron Young, you can make decisions over 3.5 inches of peak height. However, for us mortals, finding a workable balance of distance, dispersion and descent is a reasonable expectation.

Put differently, it’s not worth chasing a perfect number at the expense of a solid overall set of performance metrics.

Titleist T150 On The Course

Fittings are theoretical. The objective is to model, as accurately as possible, what the golfer is likely to experience on the course.

Playing golf on real grass (and occasionally for a couple of shekels) is where theory meets practice. It’s no secret that iron play is the weakest part of my game. And thanks to Shot Scope, I have the receipts to prove it. My primary miss with all of my irons is thin (meaning I come in too shallow and the ball contacts the face at the first or second groove as opposed to the preferred location of grooves 2 through 5). As stated, I’m trying to change that, primarily by working to move the low point of my swing more forward.

Nevertheless, on-course performance has largely tracked with my expectations coming out of the fitting, with two relative surprises. First, my thin shots tend to turn out better with the T150 as compared to the T100S. However, the more I work to move my low point forward, my hypothesis is that I might be well-served by adding a half-inch of length. Also, the T200 5-iron is out-kicking its coverage. I transitioned to the T200 in the 5-iron to maintain a workable distance gap between it and my 6-iron. What I didn’t expect is that it would maintain a small-ish profile and reduced offset typical of popular player’s distance irons (e.g., Mizuno MP 225).

Titleist T150 Feel

Titleist has been clear that emphasizing feel is a key design element of the T-Series irons. And we all understand that sound/feel is partially subjective, yet it’s clear that manufacturers can quantify what golfers do, and don’t, find appealing. To that end, I’m not ready to put Titleist in the same class as Mizuno or Srixon just yet. However, we are getting to the point where it’s fair to suggest that Titleist is serious about manufacturing irons that produce a sound/feel  that discerning golfers will appreciate.

MY $0.05

If we were to rank the T-Series line of irons from most-changed to least-changed (from the prior generation), we’d just list them in reverse order: T350, T200, T150, T100. But what can get lost with all the alterations to the T350 and T200 is that the T150 is no longer simply a strong-lofted version of the T100. It stands alone in the lineup and, while it shares many features with the T100, it is slightly larger, more forgiving and a bit faster overall than the T100.

For all of you loft-jacking critics, I’d like to note that the T350 has the strongest static loft of all the T-Series irons. Yet, with the same shaft, it generated the highest overall trajectory and an angle of descent that proved to be too steep for my setup. Though it’s not always the case, moving the center of gravity lower in the club head can require less static loft to produce the necessary flight characteristics. Put differently, a T350 7-iron at 32 degrees of static loft isn’t going to be playable by the vast majority of the target audience.

Every fitting is unique, which is why we’re so adamant about golfers taking the time to find the specs that work for them. If you can’t get a 1:1 with a professional fitter, every manufacturer has some version of an online guide or web-fitting protocol to help facilitate the process.

Parting thought: The T150 (and we’ll throw the T100 into this conversation) are examples of the iron category which I’ll be watching most closely throughout 2024. Call it QPI—Quintessential Player’s Iron. Sure, the name is entirely made up but the category isn’t.

Here are my criteria:

Muscle-back look at address (thin topline, reduced offset, compact footprint) Sound/feel of a single-piece forged iron Cavity-back levels of forgiveness, particularly on thin shots Pack in as much game-improvement technology as possible without negatively impacting #1 or #2.

Thoughts? What else would you put in this category?

For more information, visit Titleist.com.

Editor’s Note: This article was written in partnership with Titleist.

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