WGC Cadillac Match Play 2015: Tee times and schedule for Wednesday at Harding Park

The all new WGC Match Play event debuts Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco, and it will feature the most loaded collection of talent since the Masters. This will definitely be a week where golf takes a backseat to the NFL, NBA, boxing, horse racing and the NHL, but this is one of the better events on the annual PGA Tour schedule.

Everything about this year’s Match Play is overhauled. There’s a new venue, a new title sponsor, a new format and a new spot on the schedule. It used to fall during the traditional West Coast swing in the first two months of the year. But the Dove Mountain course in Arizona was annually panned by the players as one of the worst on the tour’s schedule. A move was definitely needed to put some juice into what should be one of the most unique and anticipated events each year. This early May date isn’t ideal given all the other sports things happening this week, but the TPC Harding Park course should be a significant improvement and the new format is a nice change.

The Match Play has always been a basic single elimination 64-man bracket like the NCAA Tournament. The problem with that is the event usually got worse each day. Match play can be fickle, so you can lose big names early. Some of these players would travel around the world and be done by lunchtime on Wednesday. There’s also just less golf to watch and feature as the week progresses, so if you lose some of the big guns, the event really falls off a cliff.

This year, however, a player is guaranteed three matches. The 64 players are split into 16 four-man pools (view the draw for all 16 groups here). There will be round-robin play from Wednesday through Friday, and then each pool winner advances to a more traditional 16-man single elimination bracket on the weekend. It should be a nice change early in the week. The big payouts and free world rankings points were always going to be there because it’s a WGC event, but at least now you get everyone playing three full days.

It’s rare to have a PGA Tour event on the West Coast after the first quarter of the year, but this week will have a ton of prime time golf. The combination of a three-hour time difference and an extremely small 64-man field yields plenty of flexibility for both the PGA Tour and its network partners. The first matches for the round-robin days won’t go off until just before 1 p.m. back east, and the TV broadcast is set to run until 10 p.m. That’s unheard of this time of year, save for the occasional U.S. Open which pops up on the West Coast.

And they have loaded the bottom of the match board on Wednesday. World No. 1 Rory McIlroy won’t play until 5:30 p.m. ET, meaning his entire match against Jason Dufner will fall within the 4-to-10 p.m. broadcast window on Golf Channel.

The McIlroy pool, which includes Dufner, Billy Horschel and Brandt Snedeker, is probably the deepest of all the 16 pools, and has the lowest aggregate world ranking by a significant margin. But despite their rankings, Dufner and Horschel aren’t exactly lighting it up with their form this year. Snedeker hasn’t been all that great either but he does have that Pebble Beach victory from earlier this season. Even with big names in this pool, expect McIlroy to roll to the single elimination portion of the event -- and definitely take care of Dufner on Wednesday night.

Here’s the full match schedule for Wednesday at Harding Park (all times ET):