Wells Fargo Championship 2014: Tee times, pairings for Thursday’s round

The PGA Tour continues its mid-spring swing through the south this week with the annual stop at Quail Hollow in Charlotte for the Wells Fargo Championship. This is always one of the top non-major events of the season, drawing a loaded field to a course that many players rank among the best each year when they’re polled. While Tiger Woods remains on the shelf, Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy, the other top draws in the game, make their return to the circuit after a two-week hiatus following the Masters.

Last year’s flash-in-the-pan winner Derek Ernst and the ugly weather conditions aside, this is almost always one of the best events of the year and it couldn’t come at a better time. The PGA Tour has hobbled through the first half of the year, obviously missing out on the draw of Tiger, but also producing a set of underwhelming winners and tournaments. We haven’t had the constant weather trouble that plagued last season, but there’s been a lot less drama and the biggest names have failed to make much noise.

Mickelson, who started the year announcing that he’d change his schedule in order to specifically target the U.S. Open, has uncharacteristically stumbled out of the gate. He almost always picks up a win in the first quarter of the year, but he’s barely threatened so far. It’s been a mix of injury and wildness with his game that has push Mickelson repeatedly down the leaderboard, or completely out of the weekend altogether. Now he arrives at a track he claims to love, hitting a stretch with the season’s “fifth major” next week and the all-important U.S. Open about six weeks away. We need to see more from Phil at this point, and he’ll start Thursday out later in the day alongside English duo Justin Rose and Lee Westwood (1:25 p.m.).

McIlroy, on the other hand, has played well since the start of the year and his game is in entirely different shape than this time last year, when he was basically a non-factor every week. The Ulsterman should have a win, or two, by now but has failed to close on Sundays after getting to the top of the leaderboard on the weekend multiple times on both the Euro and PGA Tour. He had a backdoor top 10 at the Masters thanks to a solid Sunday round, but he was out of it at Augusta by Friday afternoon. The Masters remains the biggest prize for McIlroy, who obviously has about two more decades to try and win one, but with that now passed, he’s another superstar that needs to start winning again, and soon. He’s out in the early morning wave, well ahead of TV coverage, playing with Jonas Blixt and Rickie Fowler at 8 a.m. ET.

Mickelson and McIlroy are only two of the top guys in this relatively loaded field. The group ahead of Phil’s pairing, Webb Simpson-Ernie Els-Zach Johnson, should be the other marquee group getting lots of love from the cameras in the afternoon. Simpson is a local who plays the course regularly, and he needs to pick up his game in order to make a run at this fall’s Ryder Cup roster. It’s a great opportunity to warm up for the biggest purse and strongest field of the year next week at TPC Sawgrass, but it’s also a tournament and course that stand on its own. The way things have run lately on the Tour, some fireworks are needed this week in Charlotte.

Here’s the full tee sheet for Thursday at Quail Hollow: