It started in a group text among friends.
 
And ended with a tour championship.
 
~
 
Well actually… it's only just getting started.
 
A special bond between former Santa Clara University men's golfers has powered an epic rise this summer, one that has elevated the former Broncos from professional golf ambiguity to Korn Ferry Tour champions and made them PGA Tour-bound.
 
Matt McCarty and his former Santa Clara teammate – now professional caddie – Devrath Das, wrapped up the 2024 Korn Ferry Tour points championship on Sunday. They won three tournaments in a span of six weeks this summer, and now they have exemptions into the 2025 US Open, 2025 Players Championship, and of course… an ever-coveted PGA Tour card.
  "I came to Santa Clara thinking I was gonna be a professional golfer … did not last very long," quipped Das.
 
While McCarty played an extra year of college golf in 2021 granted to him by the COVID-19 Pandemic, Das graduated from Santa Clara and hit the proverbial real world.
 
"I started caddying at Institute of Morgan Hill. So, I was doing that for a little bit, got a job through that. I was doing sales, just moved into an apartment, I was kinda doin' the whole 9-to-5 thing."
 
McCarty and Das got to know each other well during their time at Santa Clara University, as one would assume most college teammates would. But their bond was a bit closer than normal. They reached out to each other before college as part of the same recruiting class in 2016, they spent time together living in on-campus housing, and they later moved into a house together off campus with several teammates. The two were part of a close-knit group within the men's golf program. They and their teammates even called their off-campus house, "The Clubhouse."
 
"It was fun," said McCarty. "We were college teammates, like good college buddies. We'd play die together, hang out at the house, doing the whole thing, y'know?"

"I was like, 'all right, it's January, it's getting cold here, sounds pretty good to me.'"
— Devrath Das

As McCarty set out on his professional career after graduating in 2021, he was in need of a caddie.
 
So he sent Das a text.
 
"We have a group chat called 'The Council of Fellows.' These are all Santa Clara guys… except for one we kind of adopted to the council," said Das. "Matt's kinda doin' his whole first season as a pro, doing the mini tours and stuff. And then Matt sent me that text and I always thought I wanted to do something in golf, whether it be playing, caddying, something attached to the sport.
 
"And Matt having eight starts in the Bahamas, maybe not really liking my job as much… I was like, 'all right, it's January, it's getting cold here, sounds pretty good to me.'"
 
"I stayed for the fifth year (at Santa Clara), Dev didn't, he started working, and when I was going through Q-School I had said I'd need a caddie," said McCarty. "He was thinking about quitting his job anyway," he said with a laugh, "and it worked out like good timing with that."
  McCarty, with Das by his side, has walked quite the path to get where he stands at the end of the 2024 Korn Ferry Tour season. The game of golf has shown McCarty great success, but also taught him patience in one of the toughest ways.
 
His successful college career from 2016-21 included three first team all-West Coast Conference awards, three WCC All-Academic First Team nods and two Golf Coaches Association of America All-America Scholar accolades. And that was on top of qualifying for the 2020 U.S. Amateur Championship and the 2021 NCAA Cle Elum Regional in his final year.
 
McCarty's professional career looked to be starting out just as smooth. He made seven of his first eight cuts in 2022 with Das on the bag. The 2023 season brought even more success. After a full campaign's worth of work, he entered the final round on the final day at the final tournament of the year, and even stepped onto the tee box of the final hole, projected to finish ninth on the Korn Ferry Tour points list. The top-30 points finishers would have their 2024 PGA Tour cards stamped right there.

But then disaster struck.
 
It was the 2023 Korn Ferry Tour Championship at Victoria National Golf Club in Newburgh, Ind., less than 12 months ago in October. McCarty was standing on the 18th tee box of the 72nd hole in the final round, tied for the tournament lead and his PGA Tour card seemingly in grasp. But instead of clinching that card and achieving the dream… he hit not one, but two balls in the water. That led to him carding a quadruple bogey on the final hole and dropping from a projected ninth-place finish to a 35th place finish – and no PGA Tour Card.
 
"As we have continued to talk, it's like the little silver linings that come with golf," said Santa Clara University men's golf head coach Andrew Larkin, who coached McCarty in his final season of 2020-21. "We talked about it after his emotions kind of settled there because it's tough to deal with that, but I don't know if he was ready to be a PGA Tour member this season [2024], and then the focus [instead] for this season could just become to continue to grow and develop so when you get to the PGA Tour you stay there, which is the ultimate goal."
 
"We had the lead on Saturday afternoon, didn't finish well on the 18th hole, we're in a good opportunity to get our card that year [2023], and in our meeting after the season we kind of talked about, 'Yeah, we feel like we're ready to play on the PGA Tour,'" said Das, "but Matt kind of treated this year as getting ready for the PGA Tour, like cleaning up every aspect of his game.
 
"Matt said his fifth year at Santa Clara was kind of the same way of getting ready for professional golf," he added. "So, I think in that aspect, it wasn't surprising to get our card [in 2024]. It maybe was surprising to get it this early because the last two years we've had a chance in the last three events. We kind of expected that's how it's gonna go again, but to get it this early is incredible."
  Winning one golf tournament, be it at the local municipal course or all the way up to a professional tour, is impressive enough. It takes four days of consistency over 72 holes of golf and being better than more than 100 other golfers – all who are trying to do the same thing you are.
 
McCarty blew all that out of the water, including his old memory of putting two balls in said proverbial water, by winning three times this summer across a six-week span in July and August.
 
He and Das first won the Price Cutter Charity Championship on July 21 in Springfield, Mo., beating the rest of the field by three strokes. That victory alone earned them a 2025 PGA Tour Card, an exciting moment and the completion of a goal that slipped through their fingers a season ago.
 
But McCarty wasn't done.
 
Three weeks later on Aug. 11, he won again at the Pinnacle Bank Championship in Omaha, Neb., edging the field by one stroke. He capped his run two weeks later in Boise, Idaho, with a two-stroke victory at the Albertsons Boise Open.
 
That third win earned the duo an immediate PGA Tour card for 2024.
 
"It was definitely very different having it in my hand last week, you know, and not expecting that as well," said McCarty in August following his third Korn Ferry Tour win. "I think obviously it's something I've dreamed about doing, been working towards for a while. It feels good but it feels right, if that makes sense, especially with the golf I've been playing.
 
"It is very cool and actually holding it is a very different feeling for sure."
 
McCarty's three-victory promotion to the PGA Tour was, in fact, quite the rare historic feat. He was only the 13th player to achieve the three-win promotion since it was established more than a quarter-century ago in 1997, and only the fourth in the past 15 years (since 2009).
 
That didn't signal the end of the season, though. There was still unfinished business on the Korn Ferry Tour.
 
McCarty's three wins vaulted him to the top of the Korn Ferry Tour points list, and now he needed to finish strong to earn that top spot and secure places in next year's U.S. Open and Players Championship, the popular tournament held at the infamous TPC Sawgrass course with the island green on 17.
 
"He's progressively gotten closer to winning, and part of the hard part of the game is – you have to learn how to win, and you don't get it done the first time," said Larkin. "We kind of just kept telling him, 'You gotta keep knocking on the door.'"
 
McCarty did just that, wrapping up the Korn Ferry Tour points title with back-to-back top-35 finishes, including a top-five finish at last week's Nationwide Children's Hospital Championship in Columbus, Ohio. Now he's a Korn Ferry Tour multi-time winner, a Korn Ferry Tour points champion, and on his way to the PGA Tour in 2025 with no need to go through qualifying for the 2025 U.S. Open or The Players Championship.
  McCarty and Das both credit their experiences at Santa Clara University for setting them up with the tools to succeed. And from the stories they tell, they haven't been alone while hopping all over the country playing golf.
 
"We pull up to every event and someone says, 'Go Broncos,'" said Das. "We could be in Springfield, Missouri, or we could be in Utah or something. It's just a really good family that we can travel around and see. There are Broncos everywhere, so it's nice to have that network we can always rely on."

 "The connections created at Santa Clara go well beyond graduation"
— Andrew Larkin, Santa Clara Men's Golf Head Coach

"The community of Santa Clara is very strong," added McCarty. "Academics and that whole experience at Santa Clara was amazing and challenging in its own aspect, so you grow a lot in those four years. The Bay Area has a lot of opportunities and different things that you get introduced to at Santa Clara, which is really cool."
 
"The connections created at Santa Clara go well beyond graduation," said Larkin. "We're still seeing this now with them together, the guys that are coming out to watch them, what you see on social media from his teammates, our current players and alumni talking about it, it's pretty fun to see how heightened the Santa Clara community is behind Matt as he goes through this."
  Being a good caddie is one thing. Being a good friend is another.
 
McCarty and Das are tied together through all the ups and downs on the golf course. And it's that Santa Clara beginning that has solidified the duo's bond and propelled them to this juncture.
 
"It worked out perfect," said McCarty about nabbing Das as his caddie. "Being able to have a buddy that could commit to being a full-time person early and trying it out and then going from there, it made it easy for both of us but also less stressful for me, too. It's been fun and it made it easier the first year traveling together and the comfortability aspect of being in so many new places, but doing it with a buddy made it great."
 
"I've always caddied for friends and stuff, and I really enjoyed that part of it. I thought I would be a good fit for Matt and I've stuck it out for three years," added Das.
 
And for both of their sakes, Das says he's improved on the bag, "1,000%."
 
"That first week to now is like night and day," Das said with a grin. "First week, I dropped a bag in the middle of his backswing and those cardinal sins you can't do as a caddie. We've come a long way from then."
 
The duo's bond with the Santa Clara men's golf program has also stayed strong. Larkin has kept close ties with both of them during the early days of their professional journey.
 
"He's been very helpful," said McCarty about his former college coach. "He helped me be able to understand my fifth year as a year getting ready for professional golf. He was helpful making me understand what it takes to play at this level.
 
"I think that shows that Santa Clara community and how strong that is. Larkin's been a good resource for me."
 
"I don't know if there could be a better sales pitch for what the college golf experience is," said Larkin about the duo. "Him and Das coming through this together is huge. It's been a perfect fit for Matt, first off, because they're such good friends, but they're such a good balance off each other. It's nice to have someone to travel with and live that life outside of this with.

 "Those five or six us that that did all that together, like, that's our group of friends for the rest of our life."
— Matt McCarty

"You leave college golf and you have a network of a team and you're rooming with a kid you go to school with, and you go off to pro golf and then you're kind of by yourself. But Matt's never really been by himself, and I think Das has been huge on that."
 
However the rest of McCarty and Das' professional golf journey goes, one can be rest assured that they'll at least be experiencing it all along the way with a friend.
 
"We had fun off the course together as a team as well, which I think is important," said McCarty. "Those five or six us that that did all that together, like, that's our group of friends for the rest of our life."