IT TOOK SMOTHERMAN 100 STARTS. YOUR CREW HAS ONE OF THOSE TOO.
Austin Smotherman won the Bank of Utah Championship in his 100th PGA Tour start. Here's what that means for the player in your crew who's never won the trip.
Austin Smotherman won the Bank of Utah Championship on Sunday. It was his first PGA Tour win, and it came in his 100th start.
He shot 68 in the final round at Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah, and finished at 26 under, two clear of Doug Ghim. That's a new 72-hole record for the event. He made one real mistake on Sunday, answered it with two great shots, and played the rest of the way home without much drama.
His reaction afterward: "We won on the PGA Tour. That's insane."
The long way round
Smotherman is 32. He turned pro out of SMU in 2016 and went the long way: PGA Tour Latinoamérica, then the Korn Ferry Tour, where he won in 2021 and twice more in 2025.
The win changes his next two years. It comes with a two-year exemption, and it moved him from 79th to 51st in the FedEx Fall standings. That puts next year's signature events at Pebble Beach and Riviera within reach.
Every crew has a Smotherman
You know the one. Hasn't missed a trip in eight years. Always on the first tee on time. Has never once had their name on the trophy.
They keep showing up anyway. And when they finally win, it means more because of every year they didn't. A first win is only a story if somebody kept track of the years before it.
That's what the record is for. Loop keeps every trip, every match and every result, year after year. When your crew's version of Smotherman finally gets one, it goes in the record, right after all the years they came close.
If the same player wins every year, change the format
When one player takes the trip every year, the fix is usually the format, not the handicaps.
- Play Stableford instead of stroke play. A blow-up hole scores 0 points instead of putting an 8 on the card. One bad hole stops ending somebody's round. See Stableford.
- Put a team format on at least one day. In a shamble everyone plays from the best drive, so the higher handicaps stay in every hole.
- Save the most points for the last day. In a Ryder Cup for your golf trip, singles on the final day are worth half the points. Nobody's out of it on Saturday night.
Smotherman needed 100 tries. With the right format, your crew's version won't need eight years.