Players Championship 2016: Live updates, scores, leaderboard, highlights and more from TPC Sawgrass

After a sleepy month following the Masters, the best in the game are back for the “fifth major” in golf. The classification does not matter (there are only four majors). The Players draws the deepest field of the year, on a course we all know and one that produces drama. It’s also a welcome bridge from the Masters to the U.S. Open and the marquee event of the PGA Tour season. Here’s a quick primer on this year’s edition and updated results and highlights as the week progresses.

Jason Day is your 18-hole leader after a course record-matching round 63. TPC Sawgrass was pretty defenseless in the morning, with the greens still a bit soft and the wind down. Everyone poured in birdies and got in the red while they had the chance -- the greens are only going to get tougher as the weekend progresses. Day did it better than anyone else on a course that he’s had trouble with in the past and mitigates some of the enormous distance advantage he possesses over most of his peers.

Even with that uneven history, it was still so stupid to doubt the world No .1.

One unlucky player hit a ball up in a palm tree, and that never came back.

Rickie Fowler lit up all of TPC Sawgrass with some mismatched neon shoes.

We broke down why this Players would be must watch all weekend.

A supposedly hard thing to do in golf is to back up one super low round with yet another low round. Jason Day doesn’t seem to encounter anything especially hard in this game right now and he went out, one day after matching the course record with a 63 and posted a 6-under 66.

Day is dominating in a way he wasn’t supposed to at TPC Sawgrass, and it’s awesome to watch.

Jordan Spieth, however, got sloppy and missed the cut in his first start since that Masters mess.

Rory McIlroy put on a show and reminded us that when he’s got it going, it’s the most enthralling thing to watch in the game.

And FINALLY, at long last, the 14-year hole-in-one drought at the famous island 17th green ended.

The third round presented one of the wilder tests you will ever see on the PGA Tour. The course was an entirely different test, with most players saying they were the craziest and fastest greens that they had EVER putted on in their career. The Tour blamed an unexpected dip in humidity and increased winds for creating some of the over-the-edge conditions, but the player reaction was unanimous and disapproving, to say the least. It also led to six-hour rounds.

Sergio Garcia was the first big victim of these insane greens, five-putting from 8 feet for a quad bogey.

Russell Knox’s blow-up didn’t happen on the greens, but rather at the island 17th hole, where he duffed three into the water and posted an ugly sextuple bogey.

While it’s very, very different from Augusta National, the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass has developed that same familiarity with the players and viewers. It’s a relatively young tournament but so many of the back nine holes are instantly recognizable, led obviously by the island green.

It’s one of the more divisive courses on the PGA Tour. There’s trouble everywhere and big numbers on every single hole. The layout tends to mitigate the distance advantage that so many of the big bombers enjoy elsewhere on the PGA Tour, rewarding precision tee-to-green down narrow landing areas and into small greens. The pros are intimately familiar with Pete Dye designs -- his courses are ubiquitous on Tour and this is one of his most famous, if not most loved. But the Tour has face-lifted, tweaked, and modified the original Stadium Course setup many times over the years and it’s scheduled to have more work done after the 2016 Players (the specifics of which have been kept quiet).

TPC Sawgrass generally does not yield some runaway winning number, save for Greg Norman’s outrageous 24-under mark. The leader usually juuuust gets into double-digit under-par, depending on the conditions of course. This year the greens are reportedly soft at the start of the week, which will likely yield a low-to-mid 60s number. Someone could go out and post a 65 on Thursday or Friday but the possibility for that will dwindle dramatically on the weekend. A big critique of Sawgrass is that it generally does not yield a big move like that, rather it forces players to go conservative and avoid the many hazards and dangers that could quickly put a triple bogey on your card.

This is not some classic American course -- it’s a modern, flat Florida setup. Whatever your opinion on Sawgrass may be, it’s a familiar course that often provides a big-name winner and a wild finish down that famous closing stretch.

One of the best arguments, if you’re into making it, for The Players being a “fifth major” is the strength of its field. It’s larger, and therefore deeper, than the Masters. But it does not have a large swath of random open qualifiers or PGA teaching pros like the last three majors of the season. These 144 are the best of the best, all Tour pros and from all over the world. This year, the full top 20 in the world are back and it’s extremely rare for a player to skip this event these days, unless you’re injured. The pros are quick to acknowledge that it’s the strongest field they play all season.

And one big reason they draw such a loaded field is the purse. The PGA Tour has done everything it can make this a big-time event, their flagship tournament that could compete with the majors. It doesn’t have the history yet of the other majors, so the quickest way to compete was to offer an enormous purse. Their traditional boast is that The Players offers the richest purse in the game and that maintains today, even if the other majors jumped up to match their $10 million pot in recent years. It was The Players who went there first, started a recent arms race of sorts, and will probably never let any other tournament take the title for richest prize money in the game.

So this year, they’ve bumped it up again to a massive $10.5 million pot, a $500k increase just to keep it on top. The winner will receive $1,890,000. Not bad.

This is the biggest week of the year for PGA TOUR LIVE, the newish over-the-top streaming service. It did not exist at last year’s Players, coming out late summer in 2015. The Tour, as you’d expect, put all the top names together and then put them on their subscription streaming service for the first two rounds. That’s their big opportunity -- getting people to pay $6 per month to watch the best players in the game on those Thursday and Friday mornings that they play before the afternoon TV coverage. This should be the week with the greatest demand for it. On top of the OTT stream, there’s also a free stream focused just on the island 17th green. Golf Channel and NBC have the reins on the TV side again, starting a massive summer for them that includes the Players, British Open, Olympics, and Ryder Cup.

Saturday’s third-round coverage

Television:

9 a.m.-2 p.m. -- Golf Channel “Live From” The Players, with coverage of conclusion 2nd round in the morning
2-7 p.m. -- NBC

Online streams:

9 a.m. to 7 p.m. -- NBC Sports Live Extra simulcast stream of Round 2 and 3

11:30 a.m. -- PGA Tour Live starts with coverage from range and opening holes

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Radio:

Jason Day showed up on Saturday morning with five more holes to finish up and set a new 36-hole scoring record at The Players. The Aussie is a machine right now, so naturally, he did just that and got to 15-under at the midpoint, breaking the mark set by his countryman Greg Norman in 1994.

There was some thought, with the way Day had things working, that he might challenge the overall scoring record of 24-under. No, oh no no no no. The players faced an entirely different TPC Sawgrass on Saturday afternoon. The greens became faster than glass and it was carnage everywhere. Day held on all afternoon, got in the house with a respectable 73 and maintains the same four-shot cushion he had at the midpoint. Here’s where things stand with 18 more to play: