2018 Waste Management Phoenix Open: Tee times, pairings for Sunday’s final round

The good news about it being Super Bowl Sunday is that means it’s also Waste Management Phoenix Open Sunday. The loudest, drunkest, rowdiest event in golf concludes Sunday afternoon at TPC Scottsdale with a loaded leaderboard of top names playing in the final few groups.

The Phoenix Open achieved some sort of outsized status in the past decade or so. Social media has come to promote the atmosphere as the biggest party in golf, and maybe all sports, with scenes from the famous arena 16th hole. The party, which we’ve documented in great detail over the years here, has far outshone the actual golf tournament. The tournament still just happens to be an early-season West Coast swing event with minimal impact on the greater picture for the golf year. So we focus on the party, the unique setting, the record-breaking and quite absurd crowds (a new record was set again on Saturday with 216,818 in attendance).

So crowning the actual champion on the 18th green come Sunday afternoon is often immaterial, or just takes a backseat to everything else that goes on at this event and has become the purpose of this place. It also hasn’t helped that the last two editions of the Phoenix Open have gone to a multi-hole playoff that extended deep into the first half of the Super Bowl. We’re supposed to be set up for a finish just before 6 p.m. ET, but Hideki Matsuyama had other plans the past two years in wins over Rickie Fowler and Webb Simpson. So yes, the finish is often overshadowed and even forgotten.

This Sunday’s board is setting up for an awesome finish -- the actual golf part and not the party. That party generally tapers off for the Sunday round compared to the madness of Friday afternoon and Saturday. Playing in the final few groups are ASU alum and people’s champ Phil Mickelson, ASU product and world No. 2 Jon Rahm, rookie of the year Xander Schauffele, the gawd Bryson DeChambeau, and your 54-hole leader, Rickie Fowler.

It’s loaded. They’ll all go off just before 1 p.m. ET, setting up what should be a finish around 5:45 p.m. ET on CBS — plenty of time to conclude and then transition into Super Bowl pregame inanities. That, of course, also depends on pace of play not ballooning to five hours and there not being another four or five-hole playoff. The Tour will send them off split tees and in groups of three, which is customary on the weekends on the West Coast swing instead of the usual twosomes all rolling off No. 1 tee. With limited daylight this time of year, and a demand to finish around 6 p.m. ET or 3/4 p.m. local out west, it just makes it easier to condense the tee sheet into threesomes off two tees.

Here’s your full tee sheet for Sunday’s final round in Scottsdale: