When will Brandel Chamblee and Johnny Miller rip Rory McIlroy for working out too much?

Rory McIlroy can sure fill out his golf garb with gym-buffed abs of steel and rock hard thighs, but is his transformation from a pudgy youngster to a muscle-bound slugger good for his golf game?

At least one unnamed colleague of the world No. 1 recently appeared to echo the concerns of Brandel Chamblee, Hank Haney and Johnny Miller, who sounded the alarm about Tiger Woods’ workout bulk.

“I’m concerned with how hard [McIlroy’s] hitting the weights,” an “Anonymous Pro” offered during Golf.com’s Sunday e-mail roundtable chat among several golf writers. “He’s getting big, and it could affect his game, the way it did with Tiger. Have you seen him on Twitter? He’s ripped. The guy weighs 160 and hits it 340 yards. How much bigger does he need to be?”

That’s what Chamblee, et al have wondered frequently about Woods when the formerly top-ranked player struggled with a bad back and an errant swing throughout the 2014 season.

“He keeps referring to getting stronger and stronger and stronger, which is bizarre to me because he just needs to be faster and he traded speed for strength,” Chamblee said earlier this year. “All of this work he’s doing in the gym has made him so big and thick at the top that there’s no way that he could ever go back to swinging anywhere near the way he used to.”

As McIlroy’s body image morphed before our eyes, the talking heads have said nary a word about the winner of four major championships spending too much time lifting -- probably because he chalked up four wins on the PGA and European Tours this year to Tiger’s zero. There was that time early in the season when McIlroy, battling knee and back pain at the Memorial, conceded he had tweaked his knee working out -- and still those who bash Woods for getting all swole maintained their silence.

McIlroy will kick off the 2015 campaign as the odds-on favorite to win at Augusta and complete the grand slam cycle, but Anonymous Pro was not so keen on draping the green jacket over Rory’s brawny shoulders just yet. Pumping too much iron was just one obstacle facing the 25-year-old who has that court case against his former management firm hanging over his head.

“The sexy answer is to say he’s going to complete the career Grand Slam at the Masters and just keep going,” observed Mr. Incognito. “It’s never that easy. Look, he didn’t play that well at the Ryder Cup, he didn’t play great in Dubai and he’s got this big lawsuit going.”

We would take issue with the fellow’s (jealous or tongue-in-cheek?) characterization of McIlroy’s 2-1-2 Ryder Cup record and T2 at the European Tour’s DP World Tour Championship. Still, if McIlroy falters in April and fails to live up to his all-world billing in the early going of the season, will tongues be wagging about his exercise regimen as they have about the sculpted physique of his Nike teammate? Stay tuned.