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The 2022 Players Championship will serve as a natural endpoint for the first quarter of PGA Tour golf this season. Everything from Hawaii to Florida seems to lead into this giant week at TPC Sawgrass, which also serves as the premier tournament on the PGA Tour's annual calendar.

Everybody is playing this week. Well, almost everybody. Bryson DeChambeau is out with nagging wrist and hip injuries, but 47 of the top 50 in the world will tee it up in what should be a nasty, thrilling Players. You can call tournaments whatever you want, but to find out which ones matter the most, just check the field list.

The Players isn't technically a major championship, but when the only top 50 players who miss do so because of injury ... or a recent international incident that involved the financial arm of a foreign government and created a domino effect of lost sponsorships that may or may not result in a suspension ... you know the tournament is extremely important.

Here are six items to watch as The Players gets set to begin.

1. Hard to handicap: The Players is annually a nightmare for those of us in the prognostication game. There is seemingly no rhyme or reason to who wins or even plays well year over year. Nobody -- not even Tiger Woods -- has won this tournament more than twice since it moved to TPC Sawgrass in 1982, and not only that, it's even rare to find players who repeat even a modicum of their past success in the near future. Wins are hard to see coming, too. World No. 6 Rory McIlroy embodies this idea. He took the 2019 edition after missing the cut in 2018 and then missed it again in the next Players in 2021 (the 2020 Players was canceled). McIlroy doesn't miss many cuts, and his last three starts here show just how difficult it is to pinpoint who's going to play well.

2. Weather finally a factor: We haven't seen much wind and rain affect setups on the PGA Tour this year (or at Players Championships in the last few years), but all of that is about to change. Rain is expected throughout, and we may even get Open Championship-like wind and conditions on a few of the days. This will be music to the ears of flushers like Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Daniel Berger, Will Zalatoris, Jon Rahm and Viktor Hovland.

3. Who plays Sawgrass best (does it even matter?): Every week, I use the Data Golf course history tool to see who in the field has historically played both best overall and best compared to their week-to-week output. Here are those numbers (min. 10 rounds played at this golf course).

Best overall

  • Si Woo Kim: 2.26 strokes gained per round
  • Hideki Matsuyama: 2.18 SG
  • Justin Thomas: 2.16 SG
  • Sergio Garcia: 2.02 SG
  • Adam Scott: 1.99 SG

Best compared to their average across all events

  • Si Woo Kim: 2.01 strokes gained higher than expected
  • Mackenzie Hughes: 1.24 SG
  • Tom Hoge: 1.21 SG
  • Justin Thomas: 0.90 SG
  • Jhonattan Vegas: 0.89 SG

Though this data seems to matter a bit less here in the short term than at other courses, Data Golf still purports that it matters in the long term. That is, for players like Sergio Garcia and Adam Scott who have played a ton of rounds here (134 combined), have loads of top 20 finishes (17 combined), have beaten their baseline expectations and have both won on this course, these numbers can actually tell us a story.

The stat I'm probably more concerned with this week, though, is ball-striking over the last 20 rounds. Those are the guys who are playing well of late, and when there's a low correlation to past play at TPC Sawgrass and future results, they're probably the smarter numbers to be looking at. Here they are, according to Data Golf.

Ball-striking over last 20 rounds

  • Jon Rahm: 2.78 SG
  • Will Zalatoris: 1.98 SG
  • Cameron Young: 1.84 SG
  • Viktor Hovland: 1.83 SG
  • Justin Thomas: 1.73 SG

4. Late closing kicks: Though we've seen myriad ways to win this week -- Si Woo Kim and Webb Simpson's wire-to-wire dominance both come to mind -- TPC Sawgrass also allows for some insane closing kicks that have provided incredible drama from superstar players. Rickie Fowler played the last six holes in 6 under back in 2015 and then played four playoff holes in 2 under in the playoff to win. Last year, Thomas shot 64-68 on the weekend to beat Lee Westwood by a stroke. His run included a stretch where he played Nos. 9-12 at TPC Sawgrass in 5 under on Sunday and completely took over the tournament. It elicited some hyperbole from his now-caddie, Jim "Bones" Mackay.

"[His 5-wood into No. 16 on Sunday] was one of those shots you wish you had an additional 30 seconds … just to say, 'You'll never know how good that was,'" Mackay said in this excellent story on J.T.'s artistry.

TPC Sawgrass can be a volatile place (especially when there's weather), which also makes it a ton of fun, and when there's not extreme separation over the first two days, you often get insane weekends full of ball-striking displays that end up winning the golf tournament.

5. Big spot for Jon Rahm: The world No. 1 is losing his grip on the top spot (more on that below). Not only that, he's slipped a bit in his last two events with finishes outside the top 10 at both the Genesis Invitational and last week's Arnold Palmer Invitational. ("Slipping" is all relative when you're still posting to 20s) He'll have a chance to get it all back here, though: a stronghold on the top spot, a reminder of who the best player on the planet has been for the last several years and a win that's commensurate with the way he's been playing for almost 12 straight months.

Rahm has an interesting history at TPC Sawgrass. A T9 at the 2021 Players was impressive, but it's his T12 at the 2019 edition that folks probably remember best. Rahm led by one over Tommy Fleetwood and McIlroy going into the final round and played decently enough on the front nine before a 39 on the back that included an infamous exchange with his caddie Adam Hayes on the par-5 11th that did not end well (at least on that day) a double on the 17th that pushed him all the way out of the top 10. He's still been (by far) the best ball-striker in the world since the start of 2022.

6. New No. 1: Not only does world No. 2 Morikawa have a chance to become No. 1 for the first time, but three other players do as well, including Hovland, Patrick Cantlay and No. 5 Scottie Scheffler, who this time last month had never won a PGA Tour event. The youth movement is real, and so is the rush for No. 1 as the rest of 2022 unfolds.