Valspar Championship Recap: Casey Defends Title

By all accounts, Paul Casey is one of the good guys on the PGA Tour. He smiles a lot. Always conducts himself professionally. Never curses or swings a club in anger. Always has something positive to say about his opponents. He doesn't do any one thing exceptionally well on the golf course, doesn't do anything especially poorly. It all adds up to, well, vanilla – plain ol' vanilla.

You know, after all these years, after all the negative connotations about vanilla, it's done pretty well for itself, still a staple on the top of children's ice cream cones around the world.

Same for Casey – after all these years, he's still doing pretty well for himself. 

Casey successfully defended his title at the Valspar Championship on Sunday, sending us to the Internet to do a little digging on a 41-year-old Englishman coming up on two decades of sustained excellence. Of course, sustained excellence is a relative term. Casey is not Tiger Woods, not Phil Mickelson; he doesn't have a major title, not even one, at least not yet. 

But consider just who Casey is: He is a golfer now in his 19th year as a professional and is still in the top-20 in the world rankings some 16 years after he first got there. Not too many careers span that long at that level. For almost half of his career, however, after winning on the PGA Tour for the first time at the 2009 Houston Open, Casey was derided as The Guy Stuck On One Win. Mind you, that Casey was winning elsewhere around the world during that stateside dry spell, but you know how us Americans are. He ended that talk by winning the 2018 Valspar, and now he has made sure no such talk ever gains traction again by becoming the first Innisbrook winner to successfully defend his title. 

It was a hard-fought victory. When you win with a score of 9-under, it usually is. And Casey did so playing alongside the largest figure in the game today: world No. 1 Dustin Johnson. Oh, that's been another knock on Casey, that he has had a reputation for not closing out wins, especially from the final group. Unlike six weeks ago when Casey could not keep pace with Mickelson in the final pairing at Pebble Beach, he bettered Johnson by two shots. With Louis Oosthuizen and Jason Kokrak on his tail, Casey played the famed Snake Pit at 1-over par, which was just enough to beat them both by one stroke. In between Pebble and Copperhead, Casey added a top-3 at the WGC-Mexico. He has a win, two runners-up and a third in his past six worldwide starts, which explains why he's now up to No. 11 in the world.  

In all, Casey has 17 worldwide wins since 2001, and he's finished in the top-10 almost one of every five starts: 86 times out of 452. To be sure, there are some holes. No majors, not even a WGC. But even there, Casey's glass is far more than half full than empty. He has nine top-10s in majors and another 14 in WGCs. 

He's twice been the runner-up at the WGC-Match Play, which begins on Wednesday. Two weeks later comes the Masters, where Casey has five top-10s. He finished 6-4-6 there from 2015-17, and tied for 15th last year. In other words, he's on the short list of favorites this year. 

Imagine what would happen to Casey's legacy with a win at a major?

We're wondering whether Casey knows that at the Masters they have these heavenly ice cream sandwiches. The only this is, they're not vanilla, they're peach.

MONDAY BACKSPIN 

Louis Oosthuizen
Beginning with a fifth-place showing at the CIMB Classic in mid-October, Oosthuizen has finishes of 1-2-3-4-5 in the past five months. He tied for second at the Valspar, setting himself up nicely for the two big events in the next three weeks: the WGC-Match Play and Masters, at which both he's finished second. The 36-year-old South African appears to have put his longstanding back issues behind him, and when he's healthy he has perhaps the sweetest swing in the game. This recent surge has lifted Oosthuizen back to No. 20 in the world, a spot he hadn't occupied in about a year and a half. 

Jason Kokrak
All Kokrak needed on the 18th hole on Sunday was a par. He'd have been in a playoff. Instead, he hit a bad drive, a bad approach and two bad putts, leaving him with a bogey and probably a sleepless night. Kokrak now has 197 PGA Tour starts without a win, but he now has three runners-up. The 33-year-old is so solid tee to green, and at the Valspar he uncharacteristically ranked fifth in strokes gained: putting. He began the week outside the top-150.  As we saw over four days, if Kokrak could putt, he could win on Tour. As it is, he notched top-10s in three of the four stops on the Florida Swing and is a very solid fantasy option. 

Bubba Watson
Just in time to defend his Match Play title, and with the Masters right around the corner, Watson played very well on a tough golf course, tying for fourth at Innisbrook. After winning three times in the first half of 2018, he didn't do much the rest of the season. But this was Watson's second T4 in the past two months, the other coming at Phoenix. His stock for Austin and Augusta just went up. 

Luke Donald
The former No. 1 entered the Valspar ranked 919th in the world. It was just Donald's second event of the year, after a missed cut at the Sony, and he made the most it. He led for part of the tournament and wound up tied for ninth, lifting him to 548th in the OWGR. More importantly, Donald accrued valuable FedEx points as he tries to make his way back on a major medical extension. This was his best showing anywhere since a tie for seventh at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in October 2017 and on the PGA Tour since a runner-up at the RBC Heritage six months earlier. We shouldn't get overly excited about Donald; he is still a victim of the distance explosion in golf and, healthy or not, will be hard-pressed to compete on a weekly basis. There's a reason he chose to play at the Valspar. At least we now know Donald can be an option on certain courses, and he'll let us know which ones they are.

Dustin Johnson
Beginning the day one stroke behind Casey, Johnson was seen by many as a mere formality en route to the winner's circle. But for the first time in more than a year, the world No. 1 shot over par in the final round and skidded to a tie for sixth with a 3-over 74. This of course should have no bearing on anyone's rating of Johnson heading into the Match Play or the Masters. 

Austin Cook
When Cook won the 2017 RSM Classic as a rookie, in just his 14th PGA Tour start, well, expectations were raised. And that's often unfair. And, as we now know, misguided. Cook tied for ninth at the Valspar, and that was just his third top-10 since that victory 16 months ago. There's no reason to expect any sudden change in Cook's value. 

Denny McCarthy
McCarthy and Sungjae Im are linked, as they're they only two Web.com grads excluded from the periodic reshuffles this season – Im for winning the regular-season money title and McCarthy for the playoff title. But while Im has been making a push for Rookie of the Year honors, adding a tie for fourth at the Valspar to a string of other good finishes, McCarthy has largely struggled. He tied for ninth at Innisbrook, his best showing ever in a regular PGA Tour event (he had two better ones in opposite-field tournaments). As with Cook, don't expect anything to come from this one week. 

Charley Hoffman
About a year ago, Hoffman was ranked in the top-25 in the world. Now, he's 86th – and for that he can thank a tie for 18th at the Valspar, his best finish in eight months. There was no report of any injury, no long layoff. We can just chalk it up to poor play, plus the convoluted ranking system. And maybe that Hoffman is now 42. He didn't qualify for the Match Play this week but he is in the Masters. And we should note that Hoffman does very well at Augusta. He tied for 12th there last year, for 22nd the year before and for ninth in 2015. In five visits, Hoffman has never missed a Masters cut.
  
Henrik Stenson
Stenson opened 2019 like this: MC-MC-MC. Two of those trunk-slams were at tournaments in the Middle East, at Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where he normally excelled. And then he tied for 54th at the WGC-Mexico. But since then there has been a glimmer. Two, in fact. After tying for 17th at Bay Hill, Stenson missed the cut at TPC Sawgrass. But he came back last week with another top-25 at the Valspar. Now ranked 39th and at 42 years old, maybe Stenson won't be the every-week sure-thing we're used to. But he showed twice in Florida that his mighty tee-to-green game is still there. Stenson ranked sixth in the Valspar field in strokes gained: tee to green. 

Patrick Reed
Reed missed the cut at Innisbrook, by a lot. And his game is apparently in trouble enough that he (actually, his wife) contacted famed teacher David Leadbetter to come take a look. Reed hadn't been all that bad until arriving in Florida, where he went T50 at Bay Hill and T47 at THE PLAYERS. And that latter result was only after a terrible final round. Before, Reed had five top-25s to open 2019, albeit none of them a top-10. Reed may be having some swing issues, but we've long said he plays too much. He teed it up nine times in the first 12 weeks of the year. And he'll play this week at the Match Play. Of course this all takes on more urgency with Reed's Masters title defense coming in three weeks.