NCAA Women’s Golf Championships 2016: Results, TV schedule and how to watch online

One of the bigger gripes regular golf watchers have is that there’s not enough match play. The monotony of the weekly stroke play events on the PGA Tour and different pro tours around the world is rarely broken up for match play. There are those team events each fall and a WGC title in the spring, but that’s just about it, two big weeks. It’s an odd switch that you’ll hear many pros discuss -- they grow up playing match play format their entire lives and then almost never play it again when they turn pro.

The NCAA Championships over the next two weeks will provide a break from stroke play and they will get primetime coverage on Golf Channel. The women’s championship is up first this week followed by the men next week, all on the same course in Oregon. Here’s some background on this year’s women’s NCAA title as well as updated results and highlights as the bracket progresses.

The NCAA women’s final was about as dramatic as it gets. Every match, save for one, was tight. There was a hole-out to end one match and deliver an enormous point for Washington. Two went to extra holes. The fifth and final match ended up being the deciding point, and that needed 20 holes. It was outrageous and compelling to watch.

The biggest swings for U-dub. 1) Ying Luo took a critical point in the second match of the day with a hole-out on the 18th. At the time, it looked like this would be the match that swung the entire thing as all of the other matches were split between the two teams, and with comfortable margins. So in what looked like the only close and critical match, there was Luo putting it right in the damn cup.

2) Freshman Julianne Alvarez was simply incredible for the Huskies. So was Stanford’s Lauren Kim, who fought from a 3-down deficit late on the back nine to square things up on the 18th green and force a playoff. Alvarez three-putted the 18th, the ball lipping out for what should have been a national title. But then on the 20th hole, she stuffed a chip inside a foot, forcing Kim to concede. It’s always nice when you don’t have to take the putter out of your bag in what is the most nerve-wracking situation of your golf life. Kim could not get up and down to match and Alvarez delivered the championship-clinching point.

It was an amazing finish to a pretty cool week in Eugene. Stanford is denied the back-to-back title and Washington pulls off an improbable national championship week. Here are your final results from the final:

The Pac-12 dominates the final eight schools in the running for the Team Match Play National Championship. Five teams hail from that conference, including the top four seeds at the start of the quarters.

The juiciest quarterfinals matchup is, without question, the USC vs. Duke clash. Those two schools represent the eight of the last 14 national champions. All these schools have successful histories to varying degrees, but that Duke-USC match right out of the gate is the most anticipated. Southern Cal was No. 2 in the country coming into these championships, and Duke was No. 5. The defending national champs, Stanford, get South Carolina to start.

Update: Three of those four Pac 12 teams are through to the semis, but it was the highest ranked of all of five that fell in the quarters. Duke already has the Individual National Champion and now they’re making another run at a Team Match Play title. USC was as tough a test as they could get in the quarters and now it doesn’t get much easier in the semis up against the defending champs.

Update No. 2: It will be Washington vs. Stanford for the 2016 team title.

Figuring out the format of these NCAA championships is probably the most challenging thing about them. You might think golf has the same rules and the same object of the game everywhere, but it gets complicated with both individual and team national titles up for grabs.

The Team Match Play National Championship pits two schools against each other, and each school sends out five players. The format is obviously match play and the first school to get three points from those five one-on-one matches advances. These final eight teams are playing in a single-elimination bracket, which is simple enough.

Getting to those final eight, however, is bit of a winding path. A total of 24 teams and 12 separate individuals not from those teams made it to the finals this week. Everyone plays 54 holes of stroke play, whittling things down to a top 15 teams and nine individual players not from those teams. There are 18 more holes to cut the teams from 15 to these final eight, and an Individual National Champion is also crowned based on those first 72 holes.

The match play format is not used until the single-elimination, eight-team bracket. It’s all stroke play prior to that, both for the individual 72-hole title and as team members added up all their combined strokes to get to the match play bracket. The 72-hole Individual National Champion was Duke freshman Virginia Elena Carta, who blew everyone else out over the first 72 holes of stroke play and won the title on Monday night.

She’s just the eighth freshman to win the individual title, and it was a pretty comfortable cruise late on Monday night as she won by 8 STROKES at 16-under.

The 2016 NCAA Championships are camped out for two weeks at Eugene Country Club in Oregon. The host Ducks did make the final eight on the women’s side, and the men’s team is the No. 20 seed (out of 30) in these finals. This is the second straight year that one course will host both the women and men’s championships in consecutive weeks.

Eugene Country Club is a Robert Trent Jones, Sr. design that will play as a par-72 between 6,300 and 6,400 yards for the women. It will be a par-70 7,000-yard layout for the men.

The obvious benefit of the Oregon venue is that we get primetime golf for the next two weeks. That’s always a bonus, whether it’s a West Coast U.S. Open, some fall event in Asia, or these college championships. Golf Channel has made a significant push to have NCAA golf as a part of their spring coverage and keeping it in primetime this year is a nice advantage. It’s also on off days so as to not compete with the PGA Tour or other professional tours.

So it’s in primetime, during usual off days for golf broadcasts and with the welcome departure from the stroke play format we watch every week. Here’s the schedule for the women’s Team Match Play Championships, which includes a double session on Tuesday:

Tuesday, May 24 -- Quarterfinals, Team Match Play -- 1:30-3:30 p.m. ET
Tuesday, May 24 -- Semifinals, Team Match Play -- 6-10 p.m. ET
Wednesday, May 25 -- Team Match Play National Championship -- 6-10 p.m. ET

All the coverage will also be simulcast streamed online via Golf Channel’s Live Extra service.

Quarterfinals

Duke and UCLA rolled in the quarters, while Stanford and Washington took their required three points and happily jumped up a line on the bracket. Here are the full results from the morning match play session:

Semifinals results

When you start with five of eight teams from the same conference, there’s a good chance you can end up with an all Pac-12 final. Three of the final four teams playing in Tuesday night’s semis were from the Pac-12, but like with USC in the morning, it was the top seed that got bounced. Stanford handled Duke in the first semi, one that was expected to be another heavyweight clash.

In the second semi, No. 1 seed UCLA had owned Washington all year. But that didn’t matter for this five-match game and the Huskies advanced thanks in large part to a miracle comeback by Sarah Rhee. The UW freshman was three down with three holes to play, came back to even it up on the 18th and then holed out from a bunker in the first extra hole to push her team through to the finals.

The official results from the semis:

Three points are all that remain for the National Title. It will either be a dominant title defense from Stanford and their players who have done it before, such as the great Mariah Stackhouse ... or it will be a cinderella run of sorts from U-dub. All five matches will be in the primetime coverage window on Wednesday night on Golf Channel

Here are the lineups and tee times for the evening session of championship matches (all times ET).