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By Helen Ross
PGATOUR.com Chief of Correspondents

GREENSBORO, N.C. -- The last time Jeff Overton won a golf tournament, he was a senior at Indiana and the prize was the 2005 Big 10 Championship.

Jeff Overton has made only three bogeys all week. (WireImage)

The stakes are considerably higher on Sunday at Forest Oaks Country Club where the baby-faced 24-year-old takes a three-stroke advantage into the final round of the Wyndham Championship.

Overton shot 66 Saturday, his third straight round in the 60s, to move to 18 under. Billy

Mayfair, Anders Hansen, Tim Petrovic and Carl Petterson, who went to high school in Greensboro and college at nearby N.C. State, are tied for second at 201.

Sunday could be a life-changing event for Overton, who survived three rounds of q-school after he graduated from Indiana, only to lose his card after finishing 136th on the money list last year. He's making just his 12th start of the season in Greensboro.

A victory would mean a two-year exemption on TOUR, as well as a huge leap in the FedExCup standings. If the tournament had ended Saturday, Overton would have jumped 116 positions to No. 49.

As it is, a top-10 finish will more than likely put him among the 144 who advance next week to The Barclays, which is the first event in the PGA TOUR Playoffs for the FedExCup.

To say the FedExCup hadn't been on Overton's radar screen is probably an understatement. He does know Tiger Woods enters the Playoffs with the No. 1 seed, though, and he spent last week watching the world No. 1 pad his advantage at the PGA Championship.

"He's a first class act and he's just phenomenal," Overton said. "To see him up there at the top of the FedExCup, there's not a better player to be up there. I watched him, just learned from him and it helped this week a little bit, I guess.

"He controls his emotions so well. When he gets excited, he fist-pumps and he's awesome. But when he gets down, he grinds out and he makes the key par putts. I think that's huge -- the ability to dig deep -- and you can see him doing it. Week after week, every single time, somehow he digs deeper than everybody else.

"I'm just going to go out there and try to be kind of like him tomorrow."

Overton showed that same kind of staying power on Saturday when he made an adrenaline-aided bogey at the first hole. What "might have been the best swing of the day," he said, never left the flag but sailed over the green and landed him in "jail."

Overton shook it off at the next hole, a historically generous, 557-yard par 5 where he rolled in a 12-footer for birdie. He nearly holed a 6-iron on the par-3 fourth for a second birdie and added a 5-footer on No. 5 to find his rhythm on the way to an outward 32.

Overton has hit 87 percent of the greens at Forest Oaks this week. (WireImage)

"This is good," Overton remembers thinking. "I'm off and running, feeling a lot more comfortable, and that's what it's all about -- getting out there and getting the juices all out of your system and feeling comfortable while you're playing."

And what wasn't to like Saturday? Overton hit 11 of 14 fairways and 15 of 18 greens to rank third among his peers in that category. He's only three-putted once, and that was for par, and he's made 21 birdies in the first three rounds.

"Anytime you're 18 under, it's hard to find (something that isn't working)," Overton admitted. "I missed a few short putts, but you can't dwell on that. I made a lot of really good little down-hillers today, especially early. They're kind of tough, so it's hard to really find anything too bad."

Overton expects he'll need another day when he's hitting on all cylinders to pick up his first PGA TOUR victory. Forest Oaks is yielding plenty of sub-par scores -- in fact, the cumulative scoring average on the par-72 layout through three rounds is 69.897.

"These guys are good -- that's what they advertise," Overton said. "So I have to go out there and play another good round of golf, go out there and continue to do the things I'm doing, take the same lines and just hit really good shots, make some putts."

Overton has never held the third round lead on the PGA TOUR. But the odds are in his favor -- the third-round leader has won the Wyndham Championship 21 times since 1976, including each of the last eight years.

In the hours leading up to his 10:55 a.m. ET tee time on Sunday, though, Overton will be trying his level-headed best not to think about what might happen if he should win in just his 41st start on TOUR.

"You think about it," he said. "It's hard not to. More than anything, it's one of those things where, you know, it's a journey where we're trying to get to a point in our golfing career and we're trying to achieve a certain level, the top level in the world.

"Hopefully, we can go out there and play well tomorrow and take the experience and continue down that same path in the future."