Usually, if you’re an elite golfer playing your last stroke play round of the week on Thursday morning, something has gone terribly wrong.
As anyone who has entered a tournament knows, if your last round in a tournament comes on Thursday morning, that a lot it probably means you’re headed for a WD, or worse, a DQ.
Unless, of course, you’re playing in the annual college golf national championship. And unless your party is religiously liberal that prevents you from entering Sunday’s final round.
That was the site of this year’s NCAA golf tournament, where the BYU Cougars played on Sunday. stroke round on Thursday morning, hours before any other team starts start its national championship.
The story here begins with the schedule for this year’s national championship, which is contested over six days at the Omni La Costa resort in Carlsbad, Calif. The way the competition works is very simple: individual competitors in the top 30 teams (plus six qualifiers) play in a 72-hole stroke play tournament. The lowest scorer at the end of that tournament is the individual NCAA champion, and the bottom eight teams advance to a bracket-style playoff tournament to determine the team champion.
The nature of this competition (and the complexity of the schedule) means that the rounds will take place from Friday, May 29 until Wednesday, June 3. As long as everything goes according to plan, the teams will play a round every single day.
That’s not a problem for the 29 teams in this year’s national tournament, but it is big out for one of them: BYU. The Cougs come from an overwhelmingly Mormon university (more than 98 percent of the student body), and Sunday is a holy day of the week in the Mormon faith, a day on which those on duty are expected to worship and rest.
As such, BYU has limited its athletic programs to only play in tournaments six days a week, Monday through Saturday, testing plans to ensure that all events take place on non-Sabbath days.
For the golf team, that put the schedule for this year’s national tournament on hold. Either the team would have to withdraw from the competition, refuse to play on the day off, or they would have to break their religious obligations to compete in the national competition.
Instead, the team asked the NCAA for an exemption, seeking to play an additional playoff cycle at another time and allow the team to compete in the tournament. The NCAA did, so the Cougars left early Thursday morning to play their own On Sunday national championship round, alone, while the remainder of the field qualified for the 1st round.
By all accounts, things went pretty well Thursday for BYU, which is ranked No. 22 heading into the tournament. The Cougars shot to a team score of one under, which will be officially entered when the other teams play their rounds on Sunday. On Friday, playing against the rest of the field, BYU posted eight team points over the division.
