Valspar Championship 2022 leaderboard: Sam Burns aims to defend title, Justin Thomas leads competitive stars

Sam Burns was the lead after the final round of the 2021 Valspar Championship, and he didn’t give up that spot on Thursday with Round 1 of this year’s edition in the books. The defending champions share an 18-hole lead in the bottom seven with Jhonattan Vegas, Adam Hadwin and David Lipsky, but a host of stars of the caliber right next to them are poised to come out with amazing ease. Innisbrook as the first following players. The event kicks off this weekend.

Unlike Players, the 2022 Valspar Championship went off without a hitch on Thursday. With just three weeks to go until the first major tournament of the season, everyone is looking to perfect their match before the 2022 Masters kicks off. Some are further to the end than others, but there are still 54 holes in Palm Harbor, Florida, to tackle the twisty lines.

Let’s see our co-leaders and who can take them down in the next three rounds.

T1. Sam Burns, Jhonattan Vegas, Adam Hadwin, David Lipsky (-7): Burns, who shone last week at TPC Sawgrass, hit the ball well, but he finished first on the approach shots as well this will lead to the rest of the tournament, especially against with a number of people who have had success on this golf course (though he says that has nothing to do with what’s happening this time around). However, Burns has two other top 30s in addition to his win in the three games that started here and he’ll be in the mix over the next three days. As the favorite on +450, I don’t love him, but he’s the real thing even though his name doesn’t quite match his current talent level or world ranking ( No.17). He has every power no less than the bigger names on this list.

T5. Danny Lee, Scott Stallings, Richy Werenski, Davis Riley (-6): This is an unexpected quartet that I don’t believe will stick to the rest of the week. That’s partly due to the unusually good ball placement (especially from Werenski and Stallings) but also due to the quality of the players outpacing them and how difficult it will be to catch up with some real firepower. any of the next three innings.

T9. Justin Thomas, Doc Redman, Kramer Hickok (-5): JT looked like he was going to shoot the best bot lane of all time until he finally made some late bookings. Despite thrashing a 64-footer for Eagle on the 14th hole, he was 114th on the court in Thursday’s put-down. He is completely blushing the ball right now (first tee-to-blue, first in the world from tee-to-blue in his last 50+ rounds) and on days like today you can’t really tell get his score. He had 10 views from within 15 feet and made only three putts over 3 feet long.

“I feel good about everything,” says Thomas. “I played really well. I controlled the ball beautifully, hit a lot of really good irons, and I don’t think I’ve had a game where I’ve hit so many good putts.

“These greens are very hard to read down to the location of the very fine grain and it goes in so many different ways. They do a great job of pin placement to put them in little spots that can stop breaking when they arrive. holes or whatever. And man, I’ve hit a lot of really really good balls – I mean, maybe five, six, seven bets today feeling that way could easily happen but no . [caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay] just told me, ‘Be patient, keep your head down, keep doing what we’re doing, and some good things will happen.’ And it made those last eight holes. “

T12. Webb Simpson, Dustin Johnson, Matt Fitzpatrick, Louis Oosthuizen, Xander Schauffele, Brooks Koepka, Gary Woodland, Tommy Fleetwood (-4): Here’s what I mean about the firepower behind the leaders. Those are five major champions lurking with three defenders, and Collin Morikawa is just behind them with three under. DJ is probably the hottest as he’s about to hit a 63 at TPC Sawgrass on Monday and hit it 66 here on a day where he’s not putting the ball well at all. His 3.8 strokes on approach is the most he’s hit in a round since the 2021 WGC-Workday Championship more than a year ago and he’s started to go downhill a bit with the the arrival of Augusta National (which is scary for the rest of the world). Koepka (25-1) and Woodland (30-1) are probably valuable matchups here, and I particularly like Woodland after two T5s in his last three.