Scottie Scheffler chases a repeat title at a new course as the FedEx Cup field narrows to 30 before East Lake.
The BMW Championship tees off Thursday at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, the second stop of the FedEx Cup Playoffs and the last cut before the TOUR Championship. Fifty players survived St. Jude to get here; only the top 30 after this week move on to East Lake. Scottie Scheffler arrives with the widest points lead in the field and a shot at the first repeat BMW title since Patrick Cantlay won back-to-back in 2021 and 2022.
Scheffler's eight-shot win at St. Jude did more than pad his trophy case. It opened a points gap over the rest of the field that nobody else in the top 10 comes close to matching, and it set the tone for a bracket where survival mattered more than scoring for most of the players below him. Fifty players advanced on FedEx Cup points; close to two dozen who came into the week inside that number fell short and won't tee it up at Bellerive, Brian Harman among them, finishing well outside the cutoff. Sungjae Im was the week's biggest mover, climbing into the top 50 off a tie for fifth at St. Jude that pushed him up 13 spots. For the full breakdown of how Scheffler ran away with it, see the St. Jude recap; for how the 50-man field took shape heading into that week, see the playoffs field-set preview.
The standings behind him tell their own story. Matt Fitzpatrick sits second, followed by Cameron Young, Si Woo Kim, Wyndham Clark, Sam Burns, Chris Gotterup, Tommy Fleetwood, Collin Morikawa, and Ludvig Åberg rounding out the top 10. None of them is within striking distance of Scheffler's cushion this week, but a strong showing at Bellerive still matters. The points reset again after BMW, and nobody wants to arrive at East Lake having coasted through the week that decided who's even in the room.
Scheffler won this event in 2025, but he won it at Caves Valley, not Bellerive, so a repeat title this week means doing it on an entirely different golf course rather than defending a course he's already solved. Bellerive is hosting for just the second time, its last turn coming in 2008, which leaves little recent BMW-specific form for anyone in the field to lean on, Scheffler included. If he wins this week, it will be on the strength of his current form rather than course familiarity, and given how he closed out Memphis, that's not a small caveat in his favor.
The more interesting number this week might not be at the top of the board. The cutoff for East Lake sits at 30, and the players clustered right around it are Kurt Kitayama at 28, Bud Cauley at 29, Rickie Fowler at 30, and Gary Woodland at 31, separated by roughly two points. That's tight enough that one bad round at Bellerive could swing all four spots by Sunday. I've covered playoff races with wider gaps than what's currently separating that group, and it's the kind of margin that makes Thursday's tee times worth watching as closely as Sunday's.
Further down the standings, the last spot in the field produced the tightest finish of the week. Matt McCarty holds it, at 50th on 845.5 points, and he needed a wild final few holes to get there, bouncing between 50th, 51st, and 52nd late on Sunday before the group above him settled. Jordan Spieth's back-nine bogeys closed his own door, and Keith Mitchell's water ball and closing bogey on 18 sealed it the other way, dropping him to 51st on 837.6 points, fewer than eight points behind McCarty and out of the field entirely. McCarty arrives at Bellerive needing something close to a solo runner-up finish just to climb from 50th into the top 30 that reaches East Lake, which makes him as compelling a name to track this week as anyone above him in the standings.
The rest of the 31-to-50 group, roughly 20 players in all, is playing a similar kind of defense, not chasing East Lake outright but making sure a poor week at Bellerive doesn't knock them out of the FedEx Cup before the season ends. Im is the clearest name in that group after his St. Jude climb, needing more than a mid-pack finish at Bellerive to feel secure heading into the final playoff event.
Robert MacIntyre's status is worth watching early in the week. He withdrew from St. Jude after the first round with a knee issue, and whether he tees it up Thursday at Bellerive is still in question. His FedEx Cup position isn't as cushioned as the names above him, so a missed start here would carry real weight. Rory McIlroy is the other name to watch, coming off a tie for 66th at St. Jude in his first start since The Open. That result was a step back from the level he'd shown most of the season, and Bellerive is his chance to put it behind him before the field narrows again this weekend.
Bellerive Country Club plays to a par of 70 and measures 7,448 yards (6,810m), a layout that leans on length more than most playoff venues this season. There's no 36-hole cut this week; all 50 players in the field complete four rounds regardless of how they open. That format rewards consistency over a hot streak, which suits a leaderboard where several players need four solid rounds rather than one spectacular one to survive into the TOUR Championship.
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