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The Sam Burns-Scottie Scheffler playoff at the 2022 Charles Schwab Challenge seemed easy to categorize. Best friends (according to Burns) who often find themselves as housemates on the road on the PGA Tour duking it out at Colonial Country Club for the rights to the tournament that kick-starts what should be a thrilling summer on the PGA Tour. Two ultra-competitive 25-year-olds who are brothers off the course but gladiatorial on it.
Playoffs are binary, too. There’s one winner and one loser. It’s very straightforward. To describe it exclusively like this, though, would be completely underselling the ending to this event because the Burns-Scheffler playoff, no matter how it finished, was a victory before it even started.
To understand why, you have to pull the lens back beyond this tournament and perhaps even this season. Once Brendon Todd failed to hole his bunker shot on the 72nd hole of the tournament and either Scheffler or Burns was guaranteed another win, it meant the two would combine for at least seven victories in the 2021-22 PGA Tour season.
That’s just one fewer than the combined total won by all the golfers who are eligible to qualify for the international team at this year’s Presidents Cup. It’s three more than the combined total of all the golfers eligible to qualify for the European team at next year’s Ryder Cup.
Four of those belong to Scheffler, who on Sunday was trying to accomplish something that hadn’t been accomplished since 1980 by winning five times in a season before June 1. While the starting date of seasons has fluctuated over the years, it would have been almost impossible to attribute Scheffler’s collection of five victories to an elongated campaign that now stretches into the previous fall given Scheffler had zero wins this season (and in his career) as recently as February 1. He didn’t picked up his first until two weeks later at the WM Phoenix…
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Source : cbssports
