The Southeastern Conference is known for a lot of things — some of the best football and baseball, attractive campuses, gorgeous girls and, over the last couple years, some of the top PGA Tour golfers.
It has taken these golfers anywhere from 18 years to one to make their mark felt, but the SEC has picked up steam over the last four seasons from a conference of little representation at the tops of leaderboards to one with some of the most recognizable names in the sport.
I looked at the postseason FedEx Cup standings for these numbers because first, we measure greatest by how teams and players perform in postseason play, not in the regular season; and second, it is the best way to measure a player’s overall play through the season in lieu of wins, money earned or other statistical categories.
In 2010, there were no SEC bred golfers that finished inside the top 20 at the end of the PGA season. Not one. Eccentric, self-taught and University of Georgia grad Bubba Watson was the closest to cracking the top 20 with an SEC-best 22nd place finish.
The next year in 2011 the SEC saw its first graduate finish inside the FedEx Cup top 20 with Vanderbilt graduate Brandt Snedeker placing eighth by season’s end.
2012 is when the conference really started to show through.
Following his eighth place finish the season before, Snedeker caught fire during the four events of the FedEx Playoffs, capped with a win at Tour Championship, to finish first in the FedEx standings. But Snedeker wasn’t the only southern boy to make some noise. Watson finished 13th and Auburn graduate Jason Dufner finished 14th.
Though the 2013 season is young with only five tournaments having been played so far, the SEC boasts five golfers inside the top 15.
Snedeker, who started the year with back-to-back second place finishes and then a win at Pebble Beach, is in first, 2011 Georgia grad Russell Henley is in third, and Brian Gay — who graduated in 1994 from Florida and by far the oldest of the group — rounds out the SEC in the top 10 at sixth. Alabama alum Michael Thompson and Chris Kirk from UGA are 11th and 12th respectively.
That seems like a pretty big jump in my eyes.
I won’t claim to know specific or concrete reasons to why the SEC golfers are starting to rise leaderboards at courses across the country, but I do think there are a few reasons.
One, there are a lot of great golf courses in the Southeast. Augusta National, Pinehurst, Sea Island and Kiawah Island are wonderful courses, just to name a few. Young players from the South realize they don’t have to travel far to be challenged and tune their skills at a young age.
Two, as a prospective student, the SEC has a very attractive appeal. If you grow up in the South, surrounded by southern culture and the SEC, why wouldn’t you want to come to one of these schools? Golfers aren’t a group of athletes that get a lot of love and recognition from the student body, but as a student yourself the college experience of an SEC university is top notch.
It has taken some of these guys a few years to learn how to play on the Tour — Snedeker has been on Tour since 2004 — but they are part of the new wave of golfers to hit the scene as the generation before start to hit the latter half of their careers.
— Austin Bornheim is a senior in journalism and electronic media. He can be reached at [email protected] and can be followed on Twitter at @ABornheim.
