Atlantic Coast Conference makes decision: No college golf this fall

PALM HARBOR, Fla. — Sam Burns is a winner again in the Valspar Championship, this time with a lot more stress and plenty of more emotion. RELATED: Leaderboard | Winner’s Bag: Sam Burns, Valspar Championship Burns holed a birdie putt from just over 30 feet on the 16th hole to beat Davis Riley on the second playoff hole, giving him three PGA TOUR victories in his last 22 starts. Burns, who closed with a 2-under 69, is the second straight back-to-back winner at Innisbrook following Paul Casey’s consecutive wins in 2018 and 2019. The tournament was canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic. The victory moves Burns to No. 2 in the FexExCup and No. 10 in the world for the first time, knocking Dustin Johnson out of the top 10 for the first time in seven years. “Man, it’s crazy,” Burns said. “Davis played well today, especially the way he finished. I tried to stay steady. I didn’t make a lot of mistakes. A lot of time on Sunday if you plot your way around, make a bunch of pars, throw in a few birdies, a lot of times it works well. So happy.” Burns won last year by three shots. Riley, a rookie contending for the first time on the PGA TOUR, overcame a triple bogey on the par-5 fifth hole with a clutch 5-iron for birdie on the par-3 17th. He had a 15-foot birdie putt on the 18th for the win and left it out to the right, closing with a 72. Both made pars on the 18th in the playoff, with Riley saving par from a front bunker. Neither looked to be in great birdie position on the 16th until Burns’ putt caught the left edge and went 180 degrees around the cup before falling in the back side. Riley hit a strong pitch needing to hole it to extend the playoff and missed long. Justin Thomas (70) and Matthew NeSmith (71) each finished one shot out of the playoff, and each had a share of the lead at some point during a tense final round in warm, windy conditions on the Copperhead course. Thomas was one shot out of the lead when he laid up 54 yards short on the par-5 11th. It settled in a tiny hole that kept him from clean contact, and his wedge went just long into light rough. His chip ran 12 feet by the hole and he took bogey at the easiest hole on the course. One hole later, Burns made a 15-foot birdie putt and Thomas suddenly was four shots behind. He had two straight birdies to stay in the game and had a chance when Burns took bogey from the bunker on the 17th. But then Thomas hit his tee shot into the slope of a bunker right of the 18th and couldn’t reach the green. It was his fourth top 10 in six starts this year for Thomas. “I didn’t really do anything at all today and I very easily could have won the tournament,” Thomas said. “I mean, good drive on 18, and I have a wedge in there and could be in this playoff just as easily. But a lot to build on a, lot of positives, and we got a big stretch coming up, so I’m excited for it.” NeSmith fell back with consecutive bogeys late on the front nine. One shot behind heading to the 10th tee, he didn’t make birdie until his 12-foot putt on the 17th. He had a 35-foot putt from the fringe to join the playoff, and it just slid by the hole. Those were the only four who had a serious chance at winning. Riley had never been in contention on the back nine on the PGA TOUR and looked like he might not get there at Innisbrook. Even though he started with a two-shot lead and opened with four solid pars, the par-5 fifth turned into a nightmare. From well left of the fairway, he went left down the adjacent sixth fairway, only to chunk his third shot from 106 yards into the base of a tree. He took a penalty drop, hit long into the rough, chipped long again into the rough and made triple bogey. But he steadied himself with a 50-foot birdie putt from the fringe on No. 8 and a nervy 7-foot par putt on the ninth and the race was on.

Click here to read the full article…

ATLANTA – Brooks Koepka has the confidence to pose for nude photos. He has the composure to withstand the final-round pressure in golf’s biggest events. There may not be a more intimidating figure in the game today. But Koepka admitted that he was “freaking outâ€� about his game on Tuesday. He was in “full-panic modeâ€� on Thursday after sailing a tee shot 75 yards right of the 10th fairway. And yet, Koepka is the leader at the halfway point of the TOUR Championship. He was trailing Justin Thomas by three shots when play got underway at East Lake. Now Koepka is one stroke ahead of Thomas and Rory McIlroy with 36 holes remaining in the season finale. Xander Schauffele is two back. Related: Leaderboard | Casey pulls wrong club on 18 | Koepka discusses Body Issue After winning three times this season, including a major and World Golf Championship, Koepka has all but clinched a second consecutive Player of the Year Award. He’s two days from authoring the perfect ending to another dominant season. Koepka said late Friday his game is headed in the right direction heading into the weekend. He made that statement with his words and two 5-irons he hit on East Lake’s closing holes. The first came on the 229-yard 15th, where he laced his tee shot to the middle of the island green to set up a two-putt par on the day’s most difficult hole. Three holes later, he scared the hole with his 239-yard second shot, leaving himself just 9 feet for eagle. He missed the putt, but the birdie was enough to take the solo lead. Koepka shot 67 in each of the first two rounds at East Lake. “I feel better. I don’t feel like I’m clicking 100%, but it’s definitely close,â€� Koepka said. “There are shots where it’s like, ‘How did I just do that?’ And there are some shots where I’m like, ‘Man, why can’t I do that every time,’ like on 18.â€� He’ll play alongside Thomas in Saturday’s final group. The pairing will feature the past two PGA TOUR Players of the Year. Two years ago, Thomas’ capped a five-win campaign with a FedExCup triumph. He didn’t win the TOUR Championship, finishing second to Schauffele, but still claimed the season-long prize. That scenario doesn’t exist anymore. Under this year’s new format, the man atop the leaderboard Sunday afternoon will win both the FedExCup and TOUR Championship. Thomas shot 70-68 on Thursday and Friday, but is just one back thanks to the starting strokes he was awarded as the leader of the FedExCup. He won last week’s BMW Championship to take the top spot in the FedExCup standings. That earned him a two-stroke lead over the field at the start of the week. “I thought it was going to be easy for me to just play a tournament. It wasn’t. At least for me it wasn’t,â€� Thomas said about playing Thursday with a pre-tournament lead. “I thought it was difficult to stay aggressive, but then again, I wasn’t driving it very well, so I couldn’t be aggressive. “I don’t know, it was odd, but today definitely felt more normal.â€� He drove the ball better Friday, but his momentum was interrupted by a weather delay that hit just as the final groups were making the turn. Thomas and Koepka were both 13 under, and three shots clear of the field, when play was halted. Thomas missed just one fairway on the front nine while focusing on shortening his backswing. He only hit one on the back nine, though, and failed to make a birdie. He had to scramble just to shoot 1-over 36 on the last nine. There was a flop shot to save par on the 15th, and then a good bogey save at the 17th, where he bladed a fairway-bunker shot over the green. He missed a 6-foot birdie putt on the last hole after a good wedge shot. “It would be hard for me to say that (the delay) didn’t kind of stop my momentum because I was playing really flawlessly, I felt like, that front nine,â€� Thomas said. He has hit less than half his fairways this week (13 of 28) to rank 25th in the 30-man field in driving accuracy. He insists he’s driving it better than the statistics indicate, but the rough is so penal at East Lake that one foot can make a big difference. He had to lay up on 18 after his tee shot just trickled into the rough. “That’s the difference between me being able to hit a 4-iron and trying to make a 3 and then I’m just trying to get it over the water,â€� Thomas said. “That’s a big difference at East Lake.â€� Thomas and McIlroy are trying to join Tiger Woods as the only two-time champions in the FedExCup’s 12-year history. McIlroy won the TOUR Championship and FedExCup in 2016. He started the week five off the lead but shot 66-67 in the first two rounds. McIlroy finished Friday’s round by saving par from a greenside bunker on 16, sinking a 15-foot birdie putt on 17 and hitting a 25-yard chip to 3 feet for a closing birdie. “When they cleared the course. I was even par, sort of neutral, a nice thing for me to reset, and I thought, ‘OK, let’s give myself a goal here. Let’s play the last nine holes at 3 under par,’ and I was able to do that. It worked nicely for me.â€� McIlroy has 13 top-10s this season, including wins at THE PLAYERS and RBC Canadian Open. He leads the TOUR in Strokes Gained: Total, as well. He said before the tournament started that he believes a FedExCup victory could give him a case for the Player of the Year Award. He’ll have to earn it, though. Three of the game’s top players sit atop the leaderboard as the TOUR Championship heads to the weekend.

Click here to read the full article…

NORTON, Mass. – Mother Nature had provided a gentle forecast – crisp, fall-like weather, temperatures reaching the low 70s – but being a veteran of 37 PGA TOUR seasons, Mark Russell suspected some turbulence would accompany Friday’s first round of the Dell Technologies Championship. There had been a drastic change to the par-4 12th at TPC Boston and Russell, vice president of rules, competition and administration for the PGA TOUR, had caught wind of player discontent. Some of it was loud, much of it animated, but all of it was met with Russell’s unmatched sense of calm. “Let’s just play four rounds of golf and see what we have,â€� Russell said. Well, after just one day, we have definitive proof that architect Gil Hanse has provided a much tougher 12th hole. When the day was done, the field average was 4.453; in the previous 14 years of this tournament, the average there was 4.064. Just three birdies were made in Round 1, as opposed to years 2003-16 when an average of 14.98 were made per round. And when it came to rank, No. 12 was the toughest hole Friday, compared to being on average 7.5 in past years. It’s just one-quarter of the way through the tournament, of course, and both Russell and Hanse have asked for a bigger pool of data. Players being players, however, many have already decided they don’t like the change. “It was one of the better holes. You don’t need to change it,â€� said Justin Thomas, who seemed to have support from other vocal peers. Yet, heeding Russell’s call for a fair sample, Marc Leishman simply shrugged. He had to make a ticklish 5-footer to save par, but so be it. “I don’t really get into all that stuff,â€� the Aussie said of the controversy after his round of 4-under 67. “I just play what we’re given. That’s what we’ve been given this week, so just play on it and do as good as I can.â€� In years past, No. 12 was roughly a 465-yard hole with a green tucked in behind an environmentally friendly hazard. True, it yielded its share of double-bogeys or higher (3.51 per round between 2003-16) and there were seven made Friday, but mostly the biggest change thus far is in the lack of scoring opportunities. Kevin Na made the only morning birdie, from 29 feet, while Grayson Murray (18 feet) and Kevin Kisner (12) converted splendid approaches in the afternoon. A miserly 25.26 percent of the field found the green in regulation. Indeed, it wasn’t the 12th that players had come to know, although Leishman seemed to understand the change. “In the past, it has been more (like) driver, wedge, or driver, 9-iron. But now, you’re going to be hitting longer irons in there.â€� But more than length (and while it can stretch to a 511-yard par 4, Friday it played at around 490), the new 12th features a bunker down the left that requires a 256-yard carry, and a big “Principal’s Noseâ€� bunker down the right that can be reached at 305 yards. Since at approximately 300 yards the fairway slopes steeply downward, the play is to carry the left bunker but hit your drive up on the plateau. Therein lies one of the problems — players conceded they hadn’t yet figured out the hole and so decisions were all over the map. Adam Scott hit 3-wood, 7-iron and made par; Gary Woodland hit 2-iron, 4-iron, made bogey and seemed to admit he was confounded; Louis Oosthuizen hit 4-wood, 4-iron and made bogey by missing the green short; and Thomas stayed with a game plan to hit a big, high sweeping draw into the 13th fairway, from where he still had a 190-yard second shot. He made par but said, “I still don’t like the hole.â€� Colleagues who might have agreed with Thomas weren’t about to adopt his game plan, however. Not when the penalty for not hitting a big, high sweeping drive was trouble with trees and then a possible second shot up and over more trees. And not when quality players such as Scott (3-wood, 201-yard approach, two putts from 50 feet), Rory McIlroy (3-wood, 214-yard approach, two putts from 12 feet), and Dustin Johnson (3-wood, 6-iron, two putts from 60 feet) showed that the hole wasn’t impossible. Hanse was on-site Thursday and faced the players. So often they have sung his praises, but this time there is criticism. Like a man, he listened, but he also agreed with Russell. Give it time.

Click here to read the full article…