Scottie Scheffler brings an eight stroke blowout into the BMW Championship as the FedEx Cup race tightens

[IdlePhoenix]

The second leg of the PGA Tour's FedEx Cup Playoffs tees off at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis this week, with Scottie Scheffler arriving as the clear player to beat after an utterly dominant eight stroke victory at the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis to open the postseason. Scheffler shot rounds of 68-61-68-66 for a 17 under par total of 263, a performance that did not just win the tournament comfortably but effectively set the tone for how the rest of this year's playoff run is being talked about across the golf world.

The BMW Championship field has been trimmed down considerably from the seventy players who teed it up in Memphis, with only the top fifty in the FedEx Cup standings advancing to St. Louis this week and the field narrowing further still, down to the top thirty, before the season finally wraps up at the Tour Championship in Atlanta later this month. That kind of steadily shrinking field means every single shot carries a bit more weight than it did just a week earlier, with players fighting not just for this week's twenty million dollar purse but for their spot in the final event and a genuine shot at the FedEx Cup itself.

According to Data Golf's modeling heading into the week, every player currently inside the top eighteen of the standings already carried close to a mathematically certain chance of advancing to Atlanta, leaving a real, meaningful battle for the roughly dozen remaining spots concentrated mostly among players ranked between twenty five and forty. Names like Justin Thomas, Jake Knapp, and recent tour winner Michael Thorbjornsen currently sit just on the outside looking in, meaning a strong week at Bellerive genuinely could be the difference between a Tour Championship appearance and an early end to their season.

Scheffler himself enters the week not just as the favorite on pure recent form but also as the tournament's defending champion, having won the BMW Championship last year as well. Betting markets have him installed as a sizable favorite once again, with some books putting him nearly twenty percentage points clear of the field in win probability, a genuinely unusual gap for an event this deep into a major professional season where the entire remaining field is, by definition, already playing some of the best golf of the year just to have qualified for the event at all.

Rory McIlroy, who finished a disappointing 66th in Memphis after entering the playoffs with real momentum, will be looking to right the ship in St. Louis, telling reporters this week that he considers Scheffler the likely Player of the Year and admitted to a certain wary respect after watching him up close during last week's blowout. With the FedEx Cup bonus pool distributing a meaningful chunk of its total payout immediately after this week's event concludes, the stakes at Bellerive extend well beyond just this individual tournament's trophy.

2026 FedEx Cup Playoffs standings, schedule and format: Purse and prize money breakdownwww.cbssports.com