2015 Valspar Championship results: Jordan Spieth wins incredible playoff over Patrick Reed

While most people filled out brackets and took in selection Sunday, the PGA Tour put on a show at the Valspar Championship. Two of the top young players in the game, and the USA’s best two Ryder Cup teammates last fall, went toe-to-toe over the back nine and a ridiculous three-hole playoff. In the end, an under-hyped tournament produced a blue-chip winner and the best drama of this early season.

This overlooked event in Tampa had it all on Sunday afternoon. There was constant leaderboard movement over the back nine, players cutting down four-shot deficits, amazing escapes and saves, and two of the game’s top young stars (and Sean O’Hair!) emerging to force a playoff.

Jordan Spieth, the kid many have tabbed as the next great American player, poured in a birdie bomb on the third extra hole to finally end it at Innisbrook.

Spieth, who started the day a shot off the pace, was once three shots back with just six holes to play. But the 21-year-old started grinding and had three all-world up-and-downs over the final three holes to get in the playoff. This lengthy putt at the 18th just to get to extra holes foreshadowed the bomb that would win it.

There’s been a ton of hype around Spieth for a couple years now, but there were definitely folks in the media starting to question whether he had the “mettle” to close tournaments. He had just one win, that hole-out victory at the John Deere as a 19-year-old, and then a couple disappointing Sundays last year in the spotlight at the Masters and The Players. He hit a shaky putt on the 18th green at Riviera to miss a playoff there just a couple weeks ago and those questions popped up again.

This is his second career PGA Tour win, but his third worldwide victory in the last four months. He’s now No. 6 in the world and will roll into Augusta as one of the favorites. A big year could be coming, and a second official Tour win is probably just what was needed to propel it.

This week, Tiger Woods announced that he would not play the Arnold Palmer Invitational for the second straight year, putting his Masters start in doubt. It came just a few days after Dustin Johnson and Bubba Watson destroyed drives at Doral and few days before Spieth and Patrick Reed exchanged blows at Copperhead.

Of course this is reactionary hyperbole and Tiger always makes things bigger, but the PGA Tour probably could not have had a more ideal scenario play out these last two weeks. Those four names -- Bubba, Dustin, Reed, and Spieth -- all staggered at different ages, are likely to be prominent faces in the post-Tiger era (is that already here?).

Reed, dressed in his typical Sunday red and black, drained a birdie putt on the 18th green to make a last-second push to 10-under and get in the playoff.

The reaction was very Tiger-equse from one of the game’s young guns that’s quickly developing fans and detractors with each tournament he plays. Jason Sobel of Golf Channel jumped on this aspect as the tournament went to extra holes.

In extra holes, Reed pulled off three straight miraculous wedge shots just to stay alive and keep the pressure on Spieth and Sean O’Hair. This up-and-down from a brutal buried sand lie to save a par on the first playoff hole was legendary stuff.

So the last two weeks on Tour: young players, guys who demolish it off the tee, divisive personalities, final-hole dramas. This exact week last year, I wrote that “Getting past Tiger” was the PGA Tour’s biggest problem. Tiger will always lord over the game so long as he may or may not be a full-time player, but for the first time in these past two Tiger MIA years, it felt like the Tour was in a really strong place going forward.

This week was a total departure from the much-hyped and big money WGC event at Doral, which featured the entire top 50 in the world rankings for the first time since 2012. The field in Tampa was twice as large and the purse was almost $3.5 million less. It’s a tournament that didn’t even have a title sponsor just a couple years ago. The broadcast coverage was lighter. Even Johnny Miller, who calls the other three Florida swing events, didn’t bother to show up at Innisbrook.

In a tough spot on the schedule sandwiched between higher profile Florida swing events, the Valspar Championship messed around and delivered the tournament of the year so far on a course that some players said was the best they’d seen all year. Forget about all the Trump nonsense and over-promotion of Doral last week during the broadcasts. This course, which Adam Scott called the best they play in Florida (a blow to the egos at Doral and Bay Hill), tested the entire field but also presented multiple and repeated scoring chances to play your way into it.

It’s not like the winning score ballooned to 20-under, but Sunday’s final round was a nice change from watching world-class players dump balls in the water over and over. That WGC event produced a great winner in Dustin Johnson, but the climbing and shuffling between top names like Spieth, Reed, Henrik Stenson, and Ryan Moore made this the best Sunday afternoon so far. Here’s hoping Reed and Spieth don’t get too rich and too big to start skipping this one.

The Tour now makes the quick jump from Tampa to Orlando for the API at Bay Hill. Rory McIlroy, fresh off two disappointing Florida starts, will make his first appearance at Arnold Palmer’s event. Here are your final results from the 2015 Valspar Championship: