No More Lies

This week's big lie: the pursuit of compression is great for your golf game. Brian Manzella, Golf Digest's #14-ranked teacher in America, and Sam Osborne, former touring pro, both chased it, both got worse, and both came back. They cover what compression actually is (a delivery number, not a hand position), what Tiger meant about divots, the Foley years, why Hogan and Nicklaus got better with less forward lean, the selective pictur...

There is no test, no license, and no minimum standard to call yourself a golf teacher. This week Brian Manzella (Golf Digest's #14-ranked teacher in America) and former touring pro Sam Osborne dig into the most unregulated profession in sports: why some of the world's most famous instructors were never in the PGA of America, how club pros really earned a living 50 years ago, what an actual teaching certification could look like, an...

Brian Manzella, Golf Digest's #14-ranked teacher in America, and former touring pro Sam Osborne take apart the most persistent swing trend of the last decade: laying the club down. Where it hatched, who it might actually help, why the physics behind it doesn't hold up, and Brian's flat answer to whether anyone should try to shallow the shaft on the downswing.

Along the way: Hogan's real secret, the Ben Doyle flat left wrist confessi...

Brian and Sam continue the top 100 golf swings of all time, covering Annika Sorenstam, Calvin Peete, Tom Watson, Louis Oosthuizen, Greg Norman's 1986 swing, Gene Littler, Davis Love III, and Ernie Els. Brian makes the case that Oosthuizen, not Hogan, is the swing most golfers should copy, tells the story of quietly helping Robert Rock in 2019, and Sam remembers his Team Faldo days with a 13-year-old Rory McIlroy. The episode closes...

Brian Manzella and Sam Osborne continue the book series by comparing Claude's top 50 most influential golf instruction books against Grok's top 20, focusing on the titles the two lists disagree on. Along the way: Tommy Armour's hands-first gospel, Bobby Jones as a writer, Harry Vardon, Seymour Dunn's geometry, the flip-book that taught Ben Doyle, Alex Morrison's footwork revolution and the banked right heel in early Hogan and Snead...

The greatest golf swings of all time, positions 11 through 20. Bobby Jones, Harry Vardon, Steve Elkington, David Toms, Peter Thomson, Tom Weiskopf, Ian Woosnam, Nick Price, Sergio Garcia, and Scottie Scheffler.

Tiger Woods called one of these players the best ball-striker he ever saw. Brian worked with another one during the 2012 FedEx Cup and watched him hit it perfect for weeks at a time. And a witness once saw Harry Vardon hit dr...

Brian Manzella and Sam Osborne break down everything that happened at The Open Championship, and everything golf media won't say about it.

Ryan Fox came from outside the top 50 in the world to beat Sam Burns down the stretch, taking two brutal breaks on 15 and 17 without so much as a raised eyebrow. TV gave Fox credit for staying cool. What nobody mentioned is that Sam Burns has now missed the putts that mattered the last couple of ...

Brian Manzella has stood next to more great ball strikers than almost anyone alive. He watched Jack Nicklaus play 600 holes. He sat next to Lee Trevino. He watched Byron Nelson hit the whole bag. He was at Valhalla for prime Tiger. So when he ranks the greatest golf swings of all time, it is not a listicle. It is a verdict from someone who was actually there.

In this episode Brian unveils the 12th edition of his Top 100 Golf Swings ...

We asked AI to rank the 20 most influential golf instruction books in history. Then we tore the list apart.

Brian Manzella, Golf Digest's #14-ranked teacher in America, and former touring pro Sam Osborne react to Grok's top 10: Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, Ben Hogan's Five Lessons, The Golfing Machine, Bob Rotella, Dave Pelz, Mark Broadie and more.

In this episode:

Why Hogan's "Five Lessons" actually contains eight fundamentals, a...

Golf instruction has a war going on, and this week Brian and Sam walk straight into it.

Brian Manzella (Golf Digest's #14-ranked teacher in America) and Sam Osborne (former touring pro) trace Stack & Tilt back to its real roots: Homer Kelley's The Golfing Machine, Mac O'Grady's MORAD, and the symposiums that shaped a generation of teachers. Sam shares what happened when he actually tried the method as a tour player, and Brian ma...

Bryson DeChambeau went to the press and said AI helped fix his golf swing, name-dropping Google Gemini and tossing out terms like alpha torque, gamma torque, and passive squaring. Brian Manzella and Sam Osborne were not buying it.

In Episode 5 of No More Lies, the two veterans break down Bryson's AI press conference line by line: what he got right, what he got wrong, and why the idea of "passive squaring" does not survive contact wi...

Brian Manzella and Sam Osborne take on the loudest fight in golf: the distance debate. Both land on the same side, then explain why the people pushing hardest against a rollback are the ones with the most money on the line.

In Episode 4:

• Why the pro game has outgrown its own golf courses
• The case that a shorter, spinnier ball brings real skill back (long irons into par 4s again)
• Why the "rolled-back ball still goes 375" story is ma...

Before YouTube. Before Instagram. Before anyone was farming golf tips for engagement, the real arguments happened on message boards at 2am.

Brian Manzella was there for all of it.

In this episode, Brian and Sam trace the strange, scrappy history of golf instruction online, from a clunky Macintosh in 1996 to the forum that genuinely changed how the game gets taught.

What's inside:

Why Brian got banned from forum after forum for one her...

In Episode 2 of No More Lies, Brian Manzella and Sam Osborne open up the most contentious story in modern golf instruction: the Alpha War.

Manzella traces 12 years of golf science, from the collapse of the Golfing Machine to the rise of club kinetics and Jacobs 3D, and names the names most teachers won't.

Along the way: how the work rebuilt Padraig Harrington's career, why the PGA Tour looked like "a bunch of babies" during the LIV e...

Two veterans. Decades inside the game. Done biting their tongues. This is Episode 1 of NO MORE LIES.

Welcome to the flagship talk show of Funnel Golf. With conversations about instruction, the teaching industry, the professional game, and the game at large—covering the parts of this industry nobody else is willing to say out loud. In Episode 1, we introduce ourselves, lay out why we’re doing this, and start exact...