Farmers Insurance Open 2017 results: Jon Rahm gets 1st pro win with thrilling eagle at 18th hole

The week started with hype and anticipation for Tiger Woods’ return to the PGA Tour. It ended with a young Spanish star getting his first pro win in dramatic fashion. Here are three takeaways from the weekend at the Farmers Insurance Open.

We could re-hash the highlights of 2017 Farmers Insurance Open winner Jon Rahm’s round, but all you really need to know about the young stud was encapsulated in his 72nd and final hole of the week.

At the par-5 18th, Rahm poked his drive on a still soggy Torrey Pines just shy of 300 yards. Sitting on a lead and 260 yards into a green that slopes into a water hazard protecting the front, you would not have ripped him for, um, uh, deciding to ... whispering ... lay up? I’m not saying it would have been the best play, but we would have understood it. We saw J.B. Holmes, one of the longest hitters in the world, do this a couple years ago on this hole and lose the tournament. Rahm is also extremely long, and he threw caution to the wind, pulling a fairway metal and hitting a ridiculous sling draw into the back of the 18th green to get home in two.

The decision to go for it showed some stones, but also the type of shot he played, that rope draw was even more awe-inspiring. He then added a swaggy little club twirl and started walking after it as the ball climbed into the air! This Spaniard is going to be so much fun to watch for the next 15 or 20 years. His courage was rewarded when he dramatically bombed in a putt from 60 feet for his second eagle of the back nine that essentially locked it up with several more groups still to play into the clubhouse.

That finishing eagle put a cap on a back nine 30 and a final round 65 that no one behind him could chase down. It was the round of the day by two shots. Rahm winning so soon isn’t a surprise, but this Sunday he came a little out of nowhere and was not featured on the CBS broadcast until he started making that move late on the back nine.

Rahm is just 22 years old but was a well-known top prospect. He came over from Spain to play at Arizona State, where he won two Ben Hogan awards and the McCormack medal as the top amateur in the world in 2015. Last summer, he turned pro after earning low amateur honors at the U.S. Open, burning an exemption into the British Open just a few weeks later. He played his way back into the field as a pro, going low and contending at Congressional in his first start playing for cash. It was all part of an intro to the pro game that was one of the best in recent years.

Rahm is going to crush American hopes and dreams in the Ryder Cup for years to come. He’s also going to win plenty on the PGA Tour and should be considered an immediate threat at all the game’s biggest events, including the majors. Sunday’s finish and the way he did it ensures he’ll be a fan favorite while doing so.

The broadcast ... it stunk. I’ve tried to slow down and not indulge the constant critiques of golf broadcasts because sometimes that’s a Twitter ball of groupthink that just starts rolling downhill and we lose perspective of what’s actually happening. CBS is always the primary target of this frustration, which often escalates to anger. They’ve been crushed in recent years for showing minimal golf shots, ignoring contenders entirely, and filling the broadcast with fluff segments and commercials. I sometimes think it’s not as bad as the hysteria on Twitter would have you think and that it’s just more yelling on a social media platform prone to angry yelling.

With that said, there’s no debating that CBS’ return to PGA Tour coverage this weekend was an unqualified disappointment. There was way too much focus on the scenery, which is a trap you can fall into when you’re at a beautiful oceanside venue like Torrey Pines. But they showed surfers and paddle boarders and whales wayyyy too much, neglecting a bunched-up leaderboard that demanded rapid-fire movement from hole-to-hole to keep the audience informed. That ridiculous 30-minute coverage gap also exists, which became more than 30 minutes as college hoops went way over its block, a predictable and continued problem. On Sunday, we went more than 50 minutes before TV coverage came back on the air. The PGA Tour has fortunately just started putting the world feed up for free online during this blackout stretch as the coverage switches from Golf Channel to CBS. They should be commended for it but it’s still no excuse for TV being absent during critical moments in the middle of a final round in the year 2017.

CBS often struggles at these week-to-week PGA Tour events but at this Farmers Insurance Open, the problems seemed particularly acute. The leaderboard was clustered and they weren’t set up to handle it well, focusing instead on primarily four to five players at one time and showing so many shots on a delay. Those four or five players changed at different points in the round but there was this cap on how many we could follow for different large chunks of the broadcast. Phil Mickelson, the biggest name in the field after a cadre of superstars missed the cut, got to within two shots at one point. Two shots! Phil Mickelson playing in his hometown! You’d think we would get regular updates on Phil’s round but we (as far as I can recall and I asked a few colleagues to confirm) didn’t see a shot of his during the CBS window until a putt at the 17th hole — his second-to-last of the day and when he was really out of it. This just doesn’t make sense and is a disservice to the viewer.

All the commercials, flora and fauna shots, and limited universe of players being shown left you with no real sense of the round or flow of the day. In the end, that has to be judged a failure. I don’t enjoy writing so much about the coverage and I won’t dismiss CBS wholesale, the prevailing sentiment on golf Twitter. But they’re on notice with three more strong events and great venues to cover on this west coast swing before going back in hibernation until the Masters.

So Torrey’s South Course is a major championship venue with a ton of history and an impressive resume. The assumption is that it’s one of the best courses on the regular PGA Tour rota, which is dotted with monotonous TPC setups. The Rees Jones redesign of this course, however, has been widely panned and it’s conventional wisdom now that he ruined a pretty good thing. What we have now is just a bunch of elevated greens protected by bunkers and a whole lot of pin placements that are tough to access.

We don’t demand birdie-fests every week and a tough test may have been what we needed after multiple sub-60 rounds in the preceding two weeks. But there’s a difference between being a tough test that’s exciting to watch and one that just becomes a sputtering slog. This also came up on Twitter among regular keen golf watchers.

Rahm rescued us from a weekend largely devoid of entertainment, but Torrey and the Farmers reputation, built largely on Tiger’s patronage and years of success here, may be a little overinflated. I’m not saying it’s a dog track ... just something to think about and watch for next year!