The Phoenix Open delivers another wild weekend at TPC Scottsdale

The 2018 Waste Management Phoenix Open ended with an anti-climactic tap-in par, but the Gary Woodland stroke capped a victory that came on the heels of a horrible year.

Woodland is a mega-talent. He hits it a mile. But he can get lost in the shuffle on a tour where some 130 to 150 players tee it up each week and we tend to constantly focus on just 10 or so. So Woodland may not be the personality or “name” of some of the others on the Sunday leaderboard, but his victory reminded me that there are so many incredible talents separated by razor thin differences at the pro level.

Woodland is, from all accounts, a good dude who had a heartbreaking 2017 off the course. His actions immediately following that tap-in par were a reminder of that.

The victory came over Chez Reavie, another name who gets lost in the shuffle but a journeyman with tons of game and the ability to catch a hot streak (and let’s be honest, an incredible name that you can have some fun with). Reavie holing a bomb of a putt on the 18th to force the playoff was one of the more exciting moments on tour in this young season.

Reavie, an ASU alum, calls the WMPO his “fifth major” so there was a lot on the line for him. He’s become a personal favorite but probably didn’t bring the sex appeal many hoped for on a loaded Sunday leaderboard. That’s fine, and it might be saccharine to say, but the Woodland-Reavie battle of “lesser” names and the meaning this Sunday might have had to both is also a part of what makes this tour great.

Here are a few more thoughts on the weekend at the rowdiest, drunkest stop in golf.

For writers and media hacks, Sunday at the Phoenix Open started with buckets of promise. The first page of the leaderboard was loaded up with narratives and it was shaping up to be an incredible lead-in to the Super Bowl. We had:

Yet none of that, save for those late Phil fireworks, really materialized. Rickie and Rahm flopped in the final group. And the young guys imploded early in the round.

What we got was Woodland, Reavie, and leaderboard jumpers like Brendan Steele, Ollie Schniederjans, and Matt Kuchar at the top on the back nine. These developments were all perfectly fine, although CBS probably would have preferred otherwise on a day that started with so much promise.

Man, I’m never crazy about making the TV coverage a big part of the discussion. It seems we get wrapped up in that way too much and are always probably more critical than we need to be on Twitter, typically a place for happy thoughts and measured reaction.

But it’s the beginning of the season, at least for CBS, and we should go over a few things after this up-and-down weekend.

First off, and I touched on it briefly on Sunday morning, the coverage gap on Saturday was an unmitigated disaster. I appreciate CBS stepping up their game in 2018 with tracer technology all over the course, an increased effort to show, you know, more actual golf shots. And I like many of their on-air talent. But the point I made last week on the No Laying Up pod still stands: those efforts get washed away a bit if we enter the broadcast with smoke blowing out of our ears and pissed off about the coverage gap. I think the cliche is you only make a first impression once.

The coverage gap, that pesky 30-minute blackout when the broadcast changes over from Golf Channel to CBS, is supposed to be cut down to 15 minutes this year. It’s driven everyone insane over the years, as the TV coverage goes dark with the final round leaders just starting their day or in the middle of their front nine. We’ve always been told it’s to switch out graphics and change talent, and it only happens when we go from GC to CBS.

But the weekend college basketball ran long. We know this is a problem, a recurring one and calling the coverage gap just 30 or 15 minutes at this point is inaccurate during CBB season. Saturday’s gap was perhaps the most egregious example of this recurring problem, as the Kentucky-Mizzou game had 10 minutes left in the second half when CBS was supposed to come on the air. So we went from a planned 15-minute gap to waiting more than an hour (3:45 p.m. to 4:49 p.m. ET to be exact) between seeing live shots on TV.

The anger on Twitter, which is now a four or five-year thing with CBS and this specific problem, may have hit an all-time high. The CBS Golf account got ratio’d (don’t read the replies!). Jim Nantz seemed perturbed as they waited for UK-Mizzou finish. And it backed up a messy transition last week, when Tiger Woods was out on the course and the furor around the gap was amplified while the biggest draw in the history of the game played his first PGA Tour event in a year. The gap had a particularly rough two-week start to the season.

Now, CBS, the PGA Tour, whoever, did attempt a fix on Sunday, when, as you’d expect, the Maryland-Wisconsin basketball game ran long. For the first time, coverage was bumped back to Golf Channel at the top of the CBS broadcast. We’ve seen this many times when a Sunday round runs long — even last week, as the Torrey Pines playoff went into the start of the Grammys. Everything just shifts to Golf Channel, but they’re still using CBS talent, graphics, and production. We’ve never seen it at the start of the broadcast, which makes me think the furor over Saturday’s mess maybe, at long last, provoked change. It’s a little bizarre that we had to wait for this fix until now.

The attempt to cut the gap down from 30 to 15 minutes was admirable, but didn’t really work with the college hoops season. Here’s hoping the move made on Sunday to start on Golf Channel if basketball runs long is now a permanent policy.

Here are a few quicker notes from the weekend:

1. Justin Thomas could have used “Jimmy” out there on Saturday when things started to get a little sideways. I know Matt Killen is a trusted confidante and knows the game more than 99 percent of the people on this planet, so it’s not a shot at him. I just think Jimmy J could have helped in that scenario.

2. I saw a few people tweet it right away on Sunday evening, and the tweets were loaded up with caveats, but: Rickie Fowler is now 1-for-6 when holding the 54-hole lead on the PGA Tour. Make of it what you will but it’s a thing people will continue to tweet and track.

3. Between Rahm, Reavie, and Phil, there were plenty of ASU connections for the locals to back on Sunday. But all three faltered, most notably Reavie in the playoff, where he needed four strokes to get in from the middle of the fairway with a short iron in hand. Not sure there’s room for any of them in Herm Edwards’ New Leadership Model.

4. Rahm is a complete nutjob and I think it’s pretty great, for now. At the second hole, he nuked a drive 354 yards and had a 7-iron in on the 560-yard par-5. But he finished with a disappointing par, that included audible F-bombs after a poor lag. The guy just let it fly repeatedly throughout the day and he knows the cameras and mics are all right there picking it up. Take the precocious Spanish rage with the flair, like this absurd walk-in — it might be the quickest draw I’ve ever seen.

5. I’m not trying to be a contrarian just for the sake of being a contrarian, but is going to 16 on Sunday now the play? Will Gray tweeted all the outrageous attendance numbers, and we saw many document the madness of getting in line at 5 a.m. on Saturday to sprint to the 16th hole and then sit around for five hours until an actual golfer shows up on the hole.

I appreciate the WMPO and the 16th for what it is and don’t think we need to tone it down, but as a fan, that seems like too much work (note: I am also now old). Could Sunday be the way to go? You have to take off on Monday, most likely, but it seems like less work, a more chilled out atmosphere but still in a completely full arena, and some real stakes late in the day (although that’s not really the point of the party). You can still get as drunk and stupid as you want and then roll right into the Super Bowl party.

6. While it might make Saturday even more wild, this suggestion from Golf Channel’s Ryan Lavner also intrigued me:

The Phoenix Open is one of the strongest events on tour and has obviously carved out an identity that others can only dream of on the schedule. This may fall under “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” but there could be tweaks to play around with in the future.