- FedExCup Points: 50,000
- Purse: $7.0 million
- Winning Share: $1,260,000
- Yards: 7,415
PGA TOUR Staff
The Deutsche Bank Championship is the second of four events in the PGA TOUR Playoffs for the FedExCup. The Barclays provided drama, excitement and a number of interesting possibilities for the coming weeks. Here is what's coming up this week:
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| Complete standings, click here |
How strange is it to look at a list that Tiger Woods doesn't lead? Steve Stricker, K.J. Choi and Rory Sabbatini all passed Woods last week at The Barclays while he rested for this event. Mickelson moved within 400 points of Woods. Vijay Singh, who missed the cut at The Barclays, nonetheless remained 1,000 behind Woods, although he's now nearly 6,000 behind Stricker in the lead. Two players dropped out of the Top 10 from the initial seeding -- Brandt Snedeker and Charles Howell III, who both missed the cut at The Barclays -- while Stricker and Ernie Els moved in.
The Deutsche Bank Championship field is stronger than ever before in its history. Nine of the top 10 in Official World Golf Ranking will be there, along with 34 others in the top 50. Twenty-eight of the top 30 in the FedExCup points standings are competing, including Woods, Mickelson and Singh, who will be paired together on Friday and Saturday. Els and Scott Verplank, 10th and 15th, respectively, in the standings, will not be competing this week. Neither Els nor Verplank has ever played the Deutsche Bank Championship, but a number of top players will be teeing it up there for the first time, including Mickelson, Rory Sabbatini, Snedeker, Sergio Garcia, Boo Weekley and Padraig Harrington.
The top 40 players have mathematically clinched an invitation to the BMW Championship. This doesn't mean they don't need to play well this week. Only the top six have secured their invitation to THE TOUR Championship presented by Coca-Cola, but the rest need to be sure to have at least one good finish to get in that field. Meanwhile, this is the week someone outside the top 15 will need to step up to have a reasonable chance to win the FedExCup. Our modeling shows that players seeded below 15th or so will need three top-five finishes, including one win, to win the Cup. Therefore, the 15th to 30th seeds need to look for a top-five this week.
Outside the top 30, players are likely to have two goals in mind. First, they need to get inside the top 30 (and stay there) to get into THE TOUR Championship. Second, they will need three great finishes -- including at least one and probably two victories -- to win the Cup. Obviously, that's a Herculean task against fields as good as the one at the Deutsche Bank Championship, but if they're going to do it, they had better start now. As hard as the task is, there are a number of great players in the 30th-70th range who might come through. Henrik Stenson, Trevor Immelman, Angel Cabrera, Nick O'Hern, Aaron Oberholser and Ian Polter are all in the top 30 in the world ranking, but need to make a move in order to play in THE TOUR Championship.
For players around 70th place and below on the points list, a good finish at the Deutsche Bank Championship would mean the difference between two paychecks and none. The BMW Championship is a no-cut event, so everyone who plays there will receive both official money and FedExCup points. A player like Will MacKenzie, who dropped from 71st to 74th last week, needs at least a top-20 finish to get into the top 70. To get into the top 30, however, he will need to tie for second or better. First would vault him solidly into the top 10.
The winner of the Deutsche Bank Championship will be virtually guaranteed a trip to both the BMW Championship and THE TOUR Championship. Doug LaBelle II, currently 120th in the standings, could jump to about 20th with a win, which of course would qualify him for the BMW Championship. While it probably wouldn't mathematically guarantee a spot in THE TOUR Championship, he'd likely make it in anyway. While a win gets him two events, he needs a second just to play one more. Nearly 4,000 points out of 70th, a third-place finish would generate a nice check, but it wouldn't buy a ticket to Chicago. If he does finish second alone this week, he'll need another top-five at least at the BMW Championship to move on to Atlanta.
No one is mathematically eliminated yet. It's possible that everyone in next week's field will also be mathematically alive, but this just illustrates another way in which PGA TOUR golf is different from other professional sports. When we talk about not being mathematically eliminated in other sports, we mean something like the New York Yankees are 10 games out of the wild-card spot with 11 games to play. It's highly unlikely they're going to get in, but not out of the realm of possibility. In golf, however, "not mathematically eliminated" could mean "play a billion rounds per day for a billion years and it still won't happen. But it's not completely impossible." So I'll go out on a limb and say that everyone below 15th on the points list this week who doesn't have a top-five finish at the Deutsche Bank Championship is "virtually" eliminated from the FedExCup chase.
Players and fans have started to see how important playing well in the regular season can be to having a chance to progress in the Playoffs. Until the Playoffs began, it was easy to believe the reset point distribution didn't give adequate weight to playing well in the regular season. For example, the 59th seed could pass the first seed in the first event with a single win. However, as the events have begun to play out, it is becoming clear that, without having a great tournament such as a top-five finish, players will find it very difficult to move up very far. A mid-pack finish could easily drop a player down in the standings, despite having finished ahead of three-fourths of the field.
First name pairings I'd like to see, all of whom are in the field this week:
JP, JB & JJ (Hayes, Holmes, Henry)
KJ, DJ & Vijay (Choi, Trahan, Singh)
Bo-Boo-Bubba (Van Pelt, Weekley, Watson)
Tiger Hunter, Rory (Woods, Mahan, Sabbatini)
Will Phil Mark? (MacKenzie, Mickelson, Wilson)
Where is Spike McRoy when you need him?
