After the wind blew most of the leaders’ low scores on Saturday at AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the stage is set for what must be a convincing ending on Sunday. Conditions are expected to improve slightly as Jordan Spieth tries to lead his first victory in almost four years at the port, but his battle will be less with Mother Nature and more with Daniel Berger and Patrick Cantlay.
Spieth has been fighting for the past few years on Saturdays and Sundays, but he has remained stable in this third round with a 71 that made him move up to the final group on Sunday after a final hole erased several initial bogeys (see below). And while Spieth firing a 66 on Sunday to win that thing would be the most exciting result by a wide margin, there are good ones too.
We will rank the top spot by who is the favorite to win on Sunday – according to our friends at William Hill – and see what is at stake for all of them.
Jordan Spieth (-13 +188): Spieth’s Saturday looked stagnant until he hit home a 160-yard mark for Eagle on the 16th to equalize Berger in the lead. Berger also has an aversion to heads-up against the three-time main champion. At the 2017 Travelers Championship, Spieth left a bunker against him for a playoff victory before winning his Open Championship at the Royal Birkdale. A victory for Spieth on Sunday would be monumental for the season and for the sport as a whole. And “I have no idea how he is leading by two when he arrives on Sunday” is as good a barometer as we are for whether Spieth is back.
Patrick Cantlay (-11, +350): In doing a little bit of Cantlay research earlier in the week, I had the epiphany that he and Xander Schauffele are more or less the same player. They do the same things well and won and entered the top 10 in exactly the same clip during approximately the first 100 tournaments of their careers. I’m not sure if we talk about them in the same way, however. Sometimes I think Xander gets more attention and more headlines, which may be fair, but a victory here for Cantlay would be another step in his evolution.
Daniel Berger (-11, +550): Going back to last year’s Pebble event, Berger has eight first 10 out of 18 events, and he will almost certainly reach nine out of 19 this week. He’s been (by far) the best driver on the field so far, but his biggest problem may be keeping the guy who’s going to play behind him out of his head. Either that or the 18th hole, which he doubled on Saturday to lose the lead with Spieth and the last group on Sunday.
Russell Knox (-11, 12-1): Knox has been doing well all week, but his biggest problem now is the quality of the player tied with or in front of him. It is a problem and that number 12-1 is not long enough.
Jason Day (-10, 12-1): The day has been quiet so far this week, and he’s probably doing a good fade on Sunday. He is one of only two players in the current top 10 to lose strokes on his approach shots. Still, the pedigree is huge, so he’s always a threat, but there’s enough star power ahead of him so that he doesn’t look very attractive at 12-1.
Paul Casey (-10, 12-1): In fact, I prefer Casey chasing from behind and I like the number 12-1. He was very successful in this course, but he is not getting it as well as I would like. Still, he is the deepest scorer I like the most in the final round, and I don’t think anyone deeper than that can achieve victory.