# AT&T Oaks Course vs. Briggs Ranch Golf Club: The San Antonio Choice Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/atandt-oaks-course-vs-briggs-ranch-golf-club/ [The Course Rankings](/) Course Comparisons / Texas A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons San Antonio's best golf argument is a study in access. The AT&T Oaks Course at TPC San Antonio is a Greg Norman design that has hosted the PGA Tour's Valero Texas Open since 2010, and you can play it by staying at the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort. Briggs Ranch is a Tom Fazio design from 2002, private, the kind of course most golfers will only ever read about. The Dallas Morning News put them two spots apart in its 2025 Texas Top 100, the Oaks at No. 30 and Briggs Ranch at No. 32. Two spots. The ranking says these courses are near equals. The gates say otherwise, and the gates are part of the comparison. ## The Oaks: a Tour test you can book Greg Norman designed the Oaks with Sergio Garcia as player consultant, and it opened in 2010 straight into Tour duty. Par 72, 7,435 yards. That is a full professional length, and the Valero Texas Open has been played over it every year since, which gives a visiting golfer something no amount of marketing can fake: you can watch the best players in the world solve the same holes in the spring and then go stand where they stood, as a resort guest, with the same card in your hand. The signature detail is the 16th green, which has a bunker in its middle, copying Riviera's famous 6th hole. A bunker inside a green is a piece of theater that only works if the green is big and the pin positions around it create genuinely different holes day to day. On a Tour course it does: the 16th can play as several different par 3s across a tournament week, and for a resort guest it is the hole you describe at dinner whether you played it well or not. Norman and Garcia built a course meant to be watched as much as played, and fifteen plus years of Tour fields have stress tested every yard of it. ## Briggs Ranch: Fazio behind a gate Briggs Ranch is the quieter entry. Fazio, 2002, private, No. 32 in the same Texas Top 100, two places and eight years behind the Oaks on the public record. That thin file is itself information. Private Fazio courses of this era were built for members who play them weekly, maintained to a standard resort golf rarely matches, and kept deliberately out of the spotlight. A No. 32 state ranking earned without a Tour event, without resort traffic and without publicity says the golf itself carries the reputation among the panelists who have actually seen it. What a member gets that a resort guest does not is repetition and condition: the same course, known yardage by yardage, with none of the wear of public play. What the member gives up is the measuring stick. Nobody at Briggs Ranch can say they played their course the way the Tour just did, because the Tour has never been there. Readers can see both in [our San Antonio ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-san-antonio-tx/) and in [the full Texas state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-texas/), where the two spots between them look smaller than they feel. ## The verdict On the golf, call it close to even, with the Oaks earning its two spot edge on evidence: 7,435 yards examined annually by Tour fields since 2010 is a credential Briggs Ranch cannot present. On the day, it depends entirely on who you are. For a member, Briggs Ranch is the better life. For everyone reading this page, the Oaks is the only one of the two that exists as an option, and it happens to be a Tour course with a bunker in the middle of its 16th green. The verdict goes to the Oaks, not because private Fazio golf is lesser golf, but because a course you can actually play, at the highest level of the game, beats a course you can only admire from the ranking page. The concession to Briggs Ranch is real, though. Panelists who have seen both put them two spots apart with far less to go on for the private course, which suggests that if the gate ever opened, this verdict might flip. Until then, San Antonio's choice is simple. Book the resort, play the Tour course, and take your chances with the bunker in the green. **Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.