While you were sleeping: What you missed in Round 3 of the Open Championship

While you were enjoying your weekend snooze, the best players in the world were beginning play on moving day at the 2021 Open Championship. Below, find everything you need to know from the early portion of the action at Royal St. George’s on Saturday and prime yourself for what to expect when the action continues through the early afternoon.

3 things to know after Saturday morning at the Open Championship

1. Rory is going full Rory

Perhaps you’ve noticed a trend in Rory McIlroy’s game at major championships recently. It goes a little something like this: Rory tees off with high expectations; things go poorly; he makes the cut narrowly; when the weekend comes, he charges back; too little, too late, but good enough for a back-door top-10 finish.

Well, at the Open Championship, McIlroy is doing it again. Rory is one under through 16 holes on Saturday, and playing easily the most confident golf of his week in Sandwich thus far. It’s early to tell if he’ll have enough juice to wind up approaching contention (or nabbing a strong, back-door finish), but there’s no question that Rory’s game is approaching peak Rory-in-a-major form on Saturday.

2. Yikes, JT

It is golf’s most maddening quality: every stroke counts the same — be it a beautiful, arcing drive or a yanked three-footer. Justin Thomas knew this when he woke up on Saturday, and he certainly knows it now.

After a wayward tee shot and crafty play from the sand, Thomas faced a six-footer for par on the par-3 3rd hole. He struck his putt well, but missed, knocking it no more than 18 inches past the hole. In a bout of frustration (or perhaps an effort to absolve himself of the taste of his bogey as quickly as possible) Thomas ran around the other side of the flagstick and knocked his tap-in back toward the hole. It’s a moment we see dozens of times every weekend on the PGA Tour, but this time, his putt hit the hole and lipped out.

Instead, Thomas slinked back around and finished out a three-putt double-bogey, bringing him back to one over for the week.

3. Things are firming up

NBC’s Justin Leonard proudly reported this morning that the greens at Royal St. George’s are “a full five gravities” firmer than they were earlier in the week. Supposedly, that is a unit of measurement determined from the imprint left by a marble when it is dropped from a certain height onto the green.

While that sounds quite nice, our eyes confirm the marble’s measurement. Things look decidedly browner — and bouncier — through the early portion of play at Royal St. George’s. While the wind and the weather both seem to be cooperating for a third consecutive day, it won’t be nearly as easy for a batch of contenders to record third-round 65s as it was in the early going.

What sort of advantage will that play for the leaders? And will that preclude us from seeing a true Saturday charge? It’s still too soon to say. But conditions are surely growing more squirrely.

James Colgan

Golf.com Editor

James Colgan is an assistant editor at GOLF, contributing stories for the website and magazine on a broad range of topics. He writes the Hot Mic, GOLF’s weekly media column, and utilizes his broadcast experience across the brand’s social media and video platforms. A 2019 graduate of Syracuse University, James — and evidently, his golf game — is still defrosting from four years in the snow, during which time he cut his teeth at NFL Films, CBS News and Fox Sports. Prior to joining GOLF, James was a caddie scholarship recipient (and astute looper) on Long Island, where he is from.