The merry-go-round, as Georgia coach Chris Haack calls the match-play segment of the NCAA golf championships, begins Tuesday morning. The Bulldogs have a seat.
After going into the fourth and final round of stroke play with a three-stroke lead, Georgia merely needed to stay in the top eight to advance to the match-play quarterfinals at the Concession Golf Club. The Bulldogs did more than enough, shooting a 3-over par 291 to finish in a tie for third and earn the No. 3 seed in match play.
“That’s what you want to do, make match play,” Haack said. “Whether you finish first (in stroke play) or you finish eighth, it doesn’t matter, because now it all starts up.”
Georgia Tech, which began the fourth round in a tie for eighth with UCLA at 14-over par, fell behind the Bruins by as many as eight strokes during the round and closed to a single stroke with only a few holes remaining. But the Yellow Jackets ultimately missed the eighth spot by three shots, 1,172 strokes (20 over par) to 1,175 (23 over par).
“Every time we get close, we just make mistakes,” Tech coach Bruce Heppler said. “But they fought hard. … Ninth in the tournament’s pretty good, I guess, but you want to keep playing, but we don’t get to.”
Georgia’s pursuit of its third NCAA men’s golf title will continue with a head-to-head match with No. 6 seed South Florida, the host for this year’s championship. The winner will face the Vanderbilt-LSU winner. The other quarterfinals are Illinois-UCLA and Texas-USC.
Ranked No. 33 by Golfstat after an up-and-down season, the Bulldogs are the lowest-ranked team to make the quarterfinals by 16 slots. It’s Georgia’s first appearance in match play since 2011, when the Bulldogs lost in the finals to Augusta State, now Georgia Regents University Augusta.
“Just so proud of our guys,” junior and likely All-American Lee McCoy said. “There were some tournaments this year where a lot of people questioned us and questioned our abilities as a team. When it came down it, this is really the only thing that matters throughout the whole year.”
It was a long day for the Bulldogs, who left their hotel at 5:30 a.m. to complete the weather-delayed third round and finished their weather-delayed fourth round around 7 p.m. The Bulldogs didn’t waver, led by McCoy with a 2-under 70. Georgia’s 3-over 291 tied for the fourth-lowest score of the day in the 15-team field.
The Bulldogs’ best overall finisher was Mookie DeMoss, who tied for 11th at even par. The individual champion was Bryson Dechambeau of SMU at 8-under.
Georgia is eager to keep the season going.
“Lack of confidence won’t be my downfall,” McCoy said. “I’ll be the first to tell you I’m really confident in what I’m able to do (in match play). I wouldn’t want to be playing me tomorrow.”
For Tech, the ninth-place finish ended the careers of two of the school’s most decorated players, seniors Ollie Schniederjans and Anders Albertson. They rank second and third, respectively, in career stroke average, ahead of Jackets greats Matt Kuchar, David Duval, Stewart Cink and others.
Albertson, a two-time ACC champion, finished at 15-over in a tie for 67th. Schniederjans, who was the world’s top-ranked amateur going into this year, tied for 49th at 10-over par.
“Unfortunately, Ollie and I didn’t do our best this week,” Albertson said. “We knew we had to help lead and we had good rounds at times, but it just wasn’t our week.”
As the sun dipped below the pine trees at Concession, Schniederjans was literally at a loss for words, pausing to try to verbalize his mental state. Stunningly, he had the highest fourth-round score among Tech’s five-man lineup, a 78.
“I’m just in shock at how my final college day went down,” Schniederjans said. “It couldn’t be more of a disaster, really.”
For the rival Bulldogs, quite the opposite.
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