Upset city in Austin (again)

AUSTIN, Texas – He was the last guy in the field. He wasn’t supposed to win.

But despite being seeded 64th out of 64, or maybe because of it, Maverick McNealy made six birdies and thumped 14th-seeded Joaquin Niemann 8 and 6. The result made a perverse kind of sense at the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play.

High seed? Low? Medium? Please. The numbers next to the names don’t matter. Or maybe they do. First-round matches Wednesday reminded us sometimes it’s easier to play as the underdog.

“I loved the way I executed today,” said McNealy, who before Wednesday hadn’t played match play since the 2017 Walker Cup, where he went 4-0. “This is a good tournament; you don’t have to beat the whole field. You just have to beat the man in front of you.”

Or beat him by a lot. McNealy/Niemann was easily the most lopsided match Wednesday, and far from the only victory for the guys whose seeds were deep in the double digits.

Keith Mitchell (62) birdied three of the last six holes to tie Patrick Cantlay (4).

English journeyman Richard Bland (54) salvaged a par-filled tie with Bryson DeChambeau (9).

The seeds, which loosely mirror the Official World Golf Ranking, provide a framework by which we sometimes calibrate our amazement. But past results have told us that – all together now – anyone can beat anyone on any given day. That explains how Nick O’Hern beat Tiger Woods not once but twice in this tournament, and how another Australian, Peter O’Malley, the 64th seed, beat top-seeded Woods in 2002, perhaps the biggest upset in tournament history.

Match play is fickle, and this event is darn near impossible to predict. But for a three-year stretch when this tournament played out as many expected, we forgot that. Top-seeded Rory McIlroy won it all in the first year of pool play, in 2015. No. 2 seed Jason Day won it the next year, and top-seed Dustin Johnson hoisted the trophy in 2017. All seemed orderly enough.

Since then, however, the lower seeds have inherited the earth.

Kevin Kisner, seeded 48th, won in 2019. After the pandemic wiped out the tournament in 2020, Billy Horschel, seeded 32nd, won last year. Low seeds have a history of success in this event, but it seemed particularly surprising that the average seed of the eight quarterfinalists was 32.75 last year, when lower-seeded players won more than half of the matches.

“It seems like both of them, anything is going to happen,” said Scottie Scheffler, when asked to compare seeding for this tournament versus the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. “I would say it's probably more likely for the 64 guy to beat the 1 guy in golf than it is in basketball.”

You can say that again. Scheffler was seeded 30th last year but finished second. Already a two-time winner this season, he was seeded fifth this time and beat Ian Poulter (59th) 2 and 1.

That match, at least, wound up being true to its seeds. Plenty others did not.

Soon after the McNealy/Niemann match ended came another upset, at least on paper. Luke List, seeded 53rd, had defeated sixth-seeded Justin Thomas 3 and 2.

List has one PGA TOUR victory, at the Farmers Insurance Open earlier this season.

Thomas, who was coming off a T3 at the Valspar Championship, is a former world No. 1 with 14 TOUR wins. He beat List in a playoff at The Honda Classic four years ago.

“I'm definitely the underdog,” said List, who never trailed, closing out the upset with a two-putt birdie at the par-5 16th hole. “Justin's a great player and he played well last week, and he's gotten the better of me in the past, so I wanted to get one on him.”

The upsets kept coming. Alex Noren, seeded 50th, eeked out a 1-up victory over 10 seed Louis Ooshuizen. “I played this course in college, stroke play, and I didn't like it because I didn't play so good here,” Noren said after taking control of the match with two birdies and an eagle in the first five holes. “But then in match play I think it's a great course.”

Lucas Herbert (39) birdied the first three holes and beat Tony Finau (18), 4 and 3.

“We played a lot of match play in Australia growing up,” Herbert said.

Sergio Garcia (43) beat Jason Kokrak (22), 4 and 3. Si Woo Kim (48) beat Daniel Berger (17), 2 up.

Were brackets busted? Not entirely, but they were a bit banged up.

Thomas was a trendy pick to win it all in Austin – 71.8 percent of brackets had him emerging from Group 6 to the single-elimination phase – and while he still could, his path has narrowed. Only .6 percent of brackets had List coming out of Group 6.

Just 5.87 percent of brackets had McNealy surviving group play, and while rolling terrain at Austin Country Club resembles the back nine at Stanford Golf Course, where he played collegiately, the big question coming into this week was whether McNealy would get to play it.

When he flew to Texas on Monday, he was keeping one eye on the Valspar Championship. He knew that if the tournament was won by Sam Burns, there was a chance Burns might WD from Austin. That’s what happened, opening the door for McNealy, who got the news while watching his brother Colt’s adult-league hockey game on Monday night.

“I got the call that I was in, and five minutes after that he was on the ice when his team scored with 15 seconds on the clock to win 2 to 1,” McNealy said. “It was a good five minutes there.”

What transpired Wednesday was more like a good three hours. McNealy told himself to take it one step at a time, focus on the match at hand, the shot in front of him. But if he keeps playing like this, it may not be long before he claims his first TOUR win. He could play his way into the upcoming Masters Tournament. He could soon be, gulp, the favorite in these matches.

Not that anyone would want that.