The Open Championship has delivered the best Sundays with consistency over the past five years. It’s just on an incredible run from Phil to Rory to a playoff at St. Andrews to the duel at Troon to last year’s Spiethening. It has become the best, most entertaining major championship. That streak may end at some point, but we’re set up with several different firewalls on this Sunday. The R&A doesn’t mess around, usually just leaves the course alone, and the players deliver in a wildly different setting and style of course than we’re used to.
British Open 2018: Tee times, pairings for Sunday
The Open has been on a fantastic run of Sunday finishes over the last five years. This year is set up again with a loaded tee sheet.
The Sunday tee sheet is overflowing with potential storylines. The biggest of all, Tiger Woods winning his first major in a decade, is in play. Woods is 5-under following a dazzling Saturday 66. He’s just four shots back, tied for sixth, and will play in the third-to-last group on Sunday of a damn major championship. We haven’t seen him this close since the 2013 Open at Muirfield, when Phil Mickelson ran away from a similarly loaded tee sheet. It’s actually a great debate over which tee sheet was deeper. I tweeted the last eight groups from each and some of the numbers are pretty close.
So yes, NBC and the viewing fans should be ready to strap in for another all-time Sunday. Beyond Tiger, we have Spieth playing in the final pairing at The Open for the second straight year. This is the sixth Sunday final pairing of his nascent career, which is an absurd rate.
The R&A has the luxury of some 17 hours of daylight this time of year this far north in Scotland. With just 79 players, they have a ton of flexibility to set the tee times. On Sunday, they actually move things up a bit compared to Saturday, shooting for a 2:30 p.m. ET finish as opposed to 3 p.m. on Saturday. We will start a good hour and 15 minutes earlier than we did for the third round, when Kevin Kisner and Zach Johnson went off at 11 a.m. ET (or 4 p.m. local in Carnoustie).
This is also one major that keeps everything on schedule. The pace of play rarely exceeds four hours. We saw it on Saturday, as Tiger came in at 3:50 and the final pairing rolled in even faster. Of course players can be more deliberate in the crucible of a final round of a major, but unless there’s some 30-minute drop and recovery shot like last year, the pace is going to stay around four hours. We’ll get a trophy presentation and NBC will be off the air around 2:30 p.m.
Here’s the full tee sheet for Sunday’s final round at the British Open:
- 3 a.m.: Beau Hossler
- 3:10 a.m.: Rafa Cabrera Bello, Kiradech Aphibarnrat
- 3:20 a.m.: Si-Woo Kim, Bryson Dechambeau
- 3:30 a.m.: Bradley Keegan, Luke List
- 3:40 a.m.: Brendan Steele, Cameron Smith
- 3:50 a.m.: Paul Dunne, Tyrrell Hatton
- 4 a.m.: Brooks Koepka, Cameron Davis
- 4:10 a.m.: Kevin Na, Brett Rumford
- 4:20 a.m.: Paul Casey, Henrik Stenson
- 4:30 a.m.: Ryan Fox, Gavin Green
- 4:45 a.m.: Gary Woodland, Shubhankar Sharma
- 4:55 a.m.: Masahiro Kawamura, a-Sam Locke
- 5:05 a.m.: Rhys Enoch, Matthew Southgate
- 5:15 a.m.: Jason Day, Marcus Kinhult
- 5:25 a.m: Yuta Ideka, Adam Hadwin
- 5:35 a.m.: Brandon Stone, Sung Kang
- 5:45 a.m.: Stewart Cink, Thomas Pieters
- 5:55 a.m.: Julian Suri, Lee Westwood
- 6:05 a.m.: Marc Leishman, Tom Lewis
- 6:15 a.m.: Jason Dufner, Ross Fisher
- 6:30 a.m.: Patrick Reed, Rickie Fowler
- 6:40 a.m.: Eddie Pepperell, Phil Mickelson
- 6:50 a.m.: Bernhard Langer, Pat Perez
- 7 a.m.: Patrick Cantlay, Michael Kim
- 7:10 a.m.: Lucas Herbert, Shaun Norris
- 7:20 a.m.: Louis Oosthuizen, Sean Crocker
- 7:30 a.m.: Satoshi Kodaira, Thorbjorn Olesen
- 7:40 a.m.: Danny Willett, Ryan Moore
- 7:50 a.m.: Kyle Stanley, Haotong Li
- 8 a.m.: Byeong Hun An, Chris Wood
- 8:15 a.m.: Yasaku Miyazato, Erik Van Rooyen
- 8:25 a.m.: Tony Finau, Zander Lombard
- 8:35 a.m.: Charley Hoffman, Adam Scott
- 8:45 a.m.: Austin Cook, Justin Rose
- 8:55 a.m.: Zach Johnson, Tommy Fleetwood
- 9:05 a.m.: Rory McIlroy, Matt Kuchar
- 9:15 a.m.: Alex Noren, Webb Simpson
- 9:25 a.m.: Tiger Woods, Francesco Molinari
- 9:35 a.m.: Kevin Kisner, Kevin Chappell
- 9:45 a.m.: Xander Schauffele, Jordan Spieth
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