As Scottie Scheffler won his fifth PGA Tour title, one year after he'd captured his first, it struck me that we can expect a bit too much of the best golfers in the world. Scheffler had spent quite a long time facing questions about his dip in form, despite remaining one of the top 0.01% of ball-strikers in the sport. For a while, he just didn't quite putt well enough. It happens.
Jon Rahm has now been a short price in-running for his last two PGA Tour events and won neither. Panic! Rory McIlroy didn't get going on his second Scottsdale start. Neither did Patrick Cantlay and where the latter is concerned, we're close to an official funk given that he's gone three starts now without a top-10 finish. Don't even get me started on Viktor Hovland and Collin Morikawa. Class of 19 is on its way to Dross of 23 if this carries on.
Analysis, focusing on the minutiae, asking questions of the elite is of course part of sport. We don't always agree on what's appropriate, either in terms of question or conclusion, and the golfers at the top of the tree know the game. Surely though we can all unite on one thing this week – let's not expect too much, in fact let's not expect much at all, from Tiger Woods.
Woods confirmed on Friday – giddily via a , which in itself is revealing – that he would return to the PGA Tour for the first time since the Open Championship, here in an event he helps to host, and one which is part of the reason why his very participation in any golf tournament is cause for celebration these days.
A winner at Augusta, River Highlands and Copperhead, as well as here in California at Pebble Beach, Spieth is an old-school shot-maker with magic in his hands and it's no wonder he's taken a shine to some of the most classical courses the PGA Tour has to offer.
Since his return to the elite at around this time two years ago, it's true that his two wins have come in opportunistic fashion, the week before a major and the week after and with some help from others. The thing that is different from seven or eight years ago is that he hasn't beaten an elite field, not since 2017 in fact.
However, he certainly threatened to do so in the Open and the Masters in 2021 and wasn't far away at St Andrews last summer, and it was encouraging to see him hanging around close to the lead in Phoenix last week despite the best efforts of his putter.
Seeing Spieth leave 15-foot putts short is more alarming than those three-foot shoves we've always had to countenance but he made plenty last Friday and seems happy from a technical perspective. At some stage he expects the hole to start looking like a bucket again and, having putted well in Hawaii last month, he may well be proven right.
Teeing off early from the 10th tee, Morikawa just never got going, paying the price for an overly aggressive approach to the 12th and struggling off the tee. He seemed to suffer badly with the cool morning temperatures and was on the back foot after every tee shot.
Having been keen to chance him after an encouraging start to the year it was obviously frustrating, but he hit the ball well enough to suggest his long-game remains in good shape and I'm willing to run the risk of the putter costing us once more. Doing so with Morikawa has generally been a profitable exercise for those brave enough.
Go back through his impressive CV and you'll see that he won the WGC-Workday after a hopeless putting display here at Riviera, just as he won the Open after similar issues in Scotland a week earlier. He won at Muirfield Village after a bad-putting MC at the Travelers, and even his first win followed a bad-putting top-five in the John Deere Classic.
Thomas of course relies on his world-class approach play to be at his best and it was an upturn in that department which preceded both his 2017 US PGA win and his victory in the WGC at Firestone a year later.
His irons had been way below the levels we've come to expect when he teed off in Phoenix and for an unsettlingly long time, so when he misfired in round one it seemed he would struggle. But thereafter, Thomas found improvement each and every day, culminating in a field-leading performance on Sunday to fly through the field for third place.
He'll know just as well as anyone else how significant such strides have been to him in the past and he'll really fancy his chances at Riviera, a course he calls 'the best we play all year' and one where, encouraging debut aside, he's finished in the top 10 every time he's putted above-average.
Clark was my main player to watch in 2023, because I felt he'd given clear indications that everything was coming together for him at last. It's taken a while for this former college standout, but he remains with all the tools needed to establish himself as a PGA Tour winner and maybe more.
Breaking his duck here will be a big ask of course but James Hahn managed it at the expense of Johnson and Casey, and neither Homa nor Niemann had recent winning for to call upon, both of them one-time winners before their career-best displays here.
Scott won a 36-hole renewal in 2005, almost defended his title a year later, and has eight more top-20s at Riviera including a win in 2020. He'd led at halfway the previous year and has subsequently added a 65 and two more 66s, one of them culminating in fourth place a year ago.
Scott was 46th in the world back then and returns slightly higher up the rankings and in a weaker field absent of Johnson, Cam Smith, Niemann and a handful of others, so I was very pleasantly surprised to see him drift down the betting after a perfectly decent start to the year, having ended the last one in the mix in Australia.
List was a solid 25th when defending his Torrey Pines title a couple of weeks ago, before missing the cut by a single shot in Phoenix. As you'd expect, he hit the ball really well for the most part, particularly during round two, but made very little.
Prior to all this he'd been 11th in the Tournament of Champions, an excellent debut, before another narrow missed cut in the desert where it's fair to assume he putted quite well at times following a slow start. And while he's still got plenty to prove on the greens, it's certainly true that he's a long way improved from some of the abject displays of 2022.
Also true is the fact that he's historically been better on poa annua, perhaps no surprise given that he was born in Seattle and lived in California for several years, and I think he's a really nice fit for Riviera.
That might not seem the case with a glance at his record, but List contended here when falling to 20th on his debut and has three other top-30s. All of his three missed cuts have been by narrow margins, and he sits inside the top 20 in scoring and adjusted scoring, close to the top 10 if you set a minimum 10 rounds requirement.
Just as his record here is better than it looks, so has been his play this season, helped by definite improvement on the greens. Here's a player capable of winning an event like this with just an average putting week if his long-game fires like it did last Friday, so at a huge price he's hard to resist.
Posted at 1120 GMT on 14/02/23
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