Masters field 2014: Russell Henley, John Senden bump Augusta entrants list to 94

It’s unlikely we go over 100 entrants at this year’s Masters thanks to a prompt slow down in eligible qualifiers over the last two months, but at 94 players, the field is already larger than last year’s group.

Since we last checked in, Russell Henley, winner of the Honda Classic, and John Senden, winner on Sunday at the Valspar Championship, have punched their ticket to Augusta National. Henley, who qualified last year in his rookie season with a win at the Sony Open, missed the cut in 2013 and needed to get a win at some point to earn another trip back home to Georgia. He was the beneficiary of the Rory McIlroy Sunday collapse at PGA National earlier this month, although Henley did his part to nearly give his second career win away before edging three others in a playoff. Senden earned his fourth bid in the last six years with the win in Tampa, taking advantage of more ugly Sunday play all around him. Last year was the first time he made the cut at Augusta, finishing T35.

The slow down in the once-growing list has occurred because we went on a run of PGA Tour winners who had already qualified in other ways -- guys like Patrick Reed, Jimmy Walker, Bubba Watson, and Jason Day, who had all played their way into the field and didn’t need a win in one of the intervening tournaments this year. There are 18 total exemptions into the field, but only two pathways are still open.. The easiest way, relatively, is to win one of the three remaining tournaments before the Masters -- Bay Hill this week, and then the Valero Texas Open and the Shell Houston Open. The other is to nudge into the top 50 in the Official World Golf Rankings just one week before the Masters (and before a winner is decided at the Houston Open). Stephen Gallacher, No. 37 in the world right now after beating Tiger and Rory in Dubai earlier this year, appears safe and should make the field officially in a couple weeks.

Gallacher would make it an even 95, but there are obviously plenty of players in the fields in Orlando, San Antonio, and Houston who could get a late bid. There’s also players like Richard Sterne, Chesson Hadley, and George Coetzee, who are currently just outside the top 50 in the world but could play their way inside with some finishes near the top of the leaderboard. So the field should be at least 95, and we could get close to 100. There have not been 100 players in the field since 1960, when 103 made it to Augusta. The field of 99 golfers in 2011 was the largest since that group in 1960, and it’s possible we’re pushing that total in a month.

This larger field would bother the green jackets at Augusta, who take pride in having their very own special way of handing out invites and try to keep the field small and exclusive. In contrast, the other three majors almost always have over 150 players going off split tees from dawn to dusk the first two days of play.

We’ll continue to update as the field grows, and have a full breakdown of who’s in and how they got there when Masters week arrives (for now, he’s a breakout of all the ways you could qualify). The current 94 golfers holding an invite, including Henley and Senden, organized by country: