Final Round Notebook: THE PLAYERS Championship

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Weather: Partly cloudy, windy and hot with a high temperature of 90 degrees. Winds WSW at 20-25 mph with gusts up to 40 mph.

• Sergio Garcia carded a final-round 71 in THE PLAYERS Championship and defeated 54-hole leader Paul Goydos with a par on the first playoff hole to claim his seventh PGA TOUR title. With his win, Garcia picks up 4,950 FedExCup points and moves into 14th on the season-long points list with 6,308 points. Tiger Woods remains atop the points list with 17,745 points.

• Today's playoff ends what was the longest playoff drought on the PGA TOUR. Prior to today, the last playoff at THE PLAYERS Championship came in 1987 when Sandy Lyle beat Jeff Sluman with a par on the third playoff hole. The Memorial Tournament now has the longest active playoff drought on TOUR, dating back to 1992, when David Edwards defeated Rick Fehr with a par on the second playoff hole.

• Garcia's win comes in his 54th start since his last win on the PGA TOUR at the 2005 Booz Allen Classic.

• At the end of the day on Sunday, only four players were able to finish the tournament with an under-par score. This is the second-fewest number of players to do so in a single year since the tournament moved to TPC Sawgrass in 1982 (1999: Two players finished under par).

• Jeff Quinney keeps knocking on the winner's door on the PGA TOUR with a third-place finish on Sunday. This is the fourth top-four finish for Quinney in 43 starts since becoming a member of the TOUR.

• Chad Campbell's round of 68 on Sunday was the low round of the day and in turn moved the four-time PGA TOUR winner from T53 to T10.

• Defending champion Phil Mickelson fired a final-round 78 on Sunday and finished T21. No defending champion has finished better than T5 -- Jack Nicklaus (1977), Tom Kite (1990) and Hal Sutton (2001). Only six of the previous 34 winners of this event have finished in the Top-10 in the year following their victory.

• This marks the first time since the 2003 season that Mickelson has carded at least two rounds of 78 or higher in a single year on the PGA TOUR (78 -- Rd 3 -- 2008 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am).

• Briny Baird's final-round 72 gave him a fourth-place finish at THE PLAYERS and in turn the best finish in the Baird household, eclipsing his father Butch's T7 finish in the 1976 PLAYERS. Baird is riding somewhat of a hot streak lately with six top-20 finishes in his last seven starts, dating back to a T4 effort at the inaugural Puerto Rico Open.

• Ernie Els, despite a double-bogey at the par-4 18th, carded a final-round 72 to finish T6, thus recording only his fourth top-10 finish in 15 starts at THE PLAYERS Championship.

• With his win today, Garcia joins Tiger Woods as the only player to finish runner-up in THE PLAYERS one year and win the following year (Woods: 2000-2001).

• The par-4 18th cost 2006 PLAYERS champion Stephen Ames quite a lot this weekend as he recorded double-bogeys each day without hitting a single ball in the water.

• Kevin Stadler recorded the best finish of any first-time participant at THE PLAYERS this year. Part of Stadler's success this week came at the short par-4 fourth, where he overcame a first-round bogey with a birdie on Friday and eagles on Saturday and Sunday to play the hole in four-under par. With three eagles this week (No. 11 -- Round 2), Stadler ties Justin Leonard (2000) for the all-time PLAYERS record of three eagles in one tournament.

• Of the 15 players who made their first start at THE PLAYERS Championship this week, seven made the cut and turned in 72-hole scores:

Here are the high scores for the week on holes 16-18:
Hole 16: 7 (Richard Johnson -- Rd 1; Steve Marino -- Rd 2; Jason Bohn -- Rd 3; Jose Coceres -- Rd 4)
Hole 17: 7 (Matt Kuchar -- Rd 1; Charlie Wi -- Rd 4)
Hole 18: 9 (Richard Sterne -- Rd 4)

• Of the eight past champions who started this week, six made it to the weekend and turned in 72-hole scores:

• The daunting par-3 17th has never played as the most difficult hole for THE PLAYERS Championship in tournament history. The storied hole played as the fourth-most difficult this week with a scoring average of 3.302. The par-4 18th captured the title this week with an average of 4.522, making it the most difficult hole on the PGA TOUR thus far in 2008.