Philadelphia, PA (SportsNetwork.com) – Bubba Watson earned his fifth career PGA Tour victory on Sunday and that jumped him inside the top 20 in this week’s world golf rankings.<\/p>\n
Watson’s 2-stroke victory at the Northern Trust Open was his first title since the 2012 Masters and vaulted him 12 places in the rankings to No. 14.<\/p>\n
The top five players remained the same, with Tiger Woods maintaining the top spot ahead of Adam Scott, Henrik Stenson, Phil Mickelson and Justin Rose.<\/p>\n
Zach Johnson and Rory McIlroy swapped places again this week as Johnson returned to No. 6, dropping McIlroy to seventh. Dustin Johnson earned his second straight runner-up finish to move up three places into a tie for eighth with Sergio Garcia.<\/p>\n
Matt Kuchar and Jason Day also exchanged spots with Kuchar inching up to 10th.<\/p>\n
Steve Stricker and Jordan Spieth held firm in 12th and 13th ahead of Watson, whose jump caused a variety of moves below him.<\/p>\n
Ian Poulter fell a place to 15th and Charl Schwartzel moved up a pair of slots to 16th following his fifth-place finish at the Northern Trust Open. Graeme McDowell, Jason Dufner and Brandt Snedeker all fell two places to sit 17th through 19th, respectively. Webb Simpson dropped a spot to round out the top 20.<\/p>\n
Thomas Aiken defeated Oliver Fisher in a playoff to win the European Tour’s Africa Open Sunday, causing him to jump 34 places in the rankings to No. 79.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Philadelphia, PA (SportsNetwork.com) – Bubba Watson earned his fifth career PGA Tour victory on Sunday and that jumped him inside the top 20 in this week’s world golf rankings. Watson’s 2-stroke victory at the Northern Trust Open was his first title since the 2012 Masters and vaulted him 12 places in the rankings to No. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pga"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}