Men’s Olympic golf will tee off Aug. 11 for the first time in 112 years, as a field of 60 led by three Georgia college players vies to bring home the first gold medal since the 1904 games in Saint Louis.

But amazingly, the golfer positioned at the top the Olympic rankings barely saw the golf course his senior year in college.

Although coming off a campaign that earned him an All-American Honorable Mention nod his junior year, top-ranked Olympian Bubba Watson only played in one tournament for the Georgia Bulldogs during his final amateur season in 2001.

"The only time in NCAA history that a team had five guys make third team All-American or higher was that 2001 team. That’s how good that team was. Bubba was sitting there as your sixth guy," Georgia coach Chris Haack told Augusta.com in 2013.

Watson isn’t the only Team USA golfer to play for a school in the Peach State: Seventh-ranked Patrick Reed has two Georgia universities on his resume, and Matt Kuchar, the eighth-ranked player in the Olympics, also hails from a Georgia school with a proud golf tradition. Kuchar’s Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets boast individual NCAA champions in 1927, 1934 and 2002, and the team finished as runner-up to the national champions in 1993, 2000, 2002 and 2005.

In thinking of powerhouse college athletic programs, Augusta State University isn't the first to come to mind. But if the sport is golf, and the program is in the shadow of the world's most famous golf course — Augusta National — bigger isn't necessarily better.

Golf may be Augusta State's only Division I sport, but the teams are good — the men won back-to-back national championships in 2010 and 2011, the first to do so since the Houston Cougars in 1984 and 1985, according to USA Today.

Reed made integral contributions to Augusta's teams, though not without controversy. The Jaguars' 2010 championship came at the expense of the Oklahoma State Cowboys, the team that third-ranked Olympian Rickie Fowler played for just a couple of years prior. In 2011, Augusta State beat Watson's alma mater, in-state rival Georgia, the school from which Reed had transferred for the 2009-10 school year after a checkered freshman year with the Bulldogs.

Although participating countries can send up to four golfers to Rio, Olympic golf's reboot is a purely individual competition, so players searching for extra motivation may have to rely on school spirit rather than flag-waving.

Notable international golfers to attend U.S. universities include Belgium's 23rd-ranked Thomas Pieters, who won the individual National Championship in 2012 for the Illinois Fighting Illini with a four-under 208. Team honors went to the Texas Longhorns led by American Jordan Spieth, one of the many male golfers conspicuously absent from the Rio games. South African Brandon Stone, ranked 29th, and Venezuelan Jhonattan Vegas, ranked 48th, also attended Texas.

Padraig Harrington, the 43rd-ranked competitor out of Ireland, attended Dublin Business College, which may or may not have helped him out-earn in-family rival Dan Harrington, a World Series of Poker stalwart who has career winnings in the millions of dollars.

Both Padraig and Dan Harrington are also distant cousins of former NFL quarterback Joey Harrington, who earned All-American honors with the Oregon Ducks, winners of the 2016 NCAA men’s golf champion.

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