BMW Championship: Another postseason birdie fest at FedEx Cup Playoffs

At the BMW Championship, for a second consecutive week, the PGA Tour’s best are treating a showpiece tournament like a second-tier fall schedule stop.

This time the scene of the crime is Caves Valley outside Baltimore. The BMW Championship is a big deal by Tour standards as it is part of the annual FedEx Cup Playoffs. It has a $9.5 million purse, a $1.71 million first prize, and finishing among the top five virtually guarantees a berth in the even bigger Tour Championship coming up at East Lake.

Yet as it happened last week during the playoffs’ first stop at Liberty National, the Caves Creek layout has proven incapable of giving the field any sort of worthy test.

Through three rounds of play, the average score is more than seven and three-quarters strokes below par. Only 28 rounds all week – that’s just one of every seven rounds played – has come in over par, never by more than three strokes.

Among the 69 entrants, only Russell Henley (72-73-73) has failed to break par at least once.

Field-wide low scores can happen on Tour, although that’s usually only seen at second-tier events. But this is two weeks in a row that the host course on the Tour’s post-season extravaganza has laid down and rolled over for the pros.

Last week at the Northern Trust at Liberty National, the four-round field average score was 8.06 strokes under par. Entering play Sunday, the BMW Championship field is poised to surpass that number by as much as two full strokes. The projected average is -10.17.

You can defend Caves Creek by asserting that it has been a victim of weather … and the TV voices have said exactly that. You can contend the phenomenally low scores are simply a byproduct of condensing the field down to the game’s best.

If this week’s scores represented a post-season one-off, those assertions might even be credible. But they are not. The inescapable conclusion of the performances at both Liberty National and Caves Creek is that the Tour is setting up its championship courses to be playgrounds in the belief that TV ratings will spike as scores plummet.

The trend toward absurdly low scores these past two weeks simply cannot be missed. If the BMW Championship field does indeed end up averaging 10.17 strokes under par — its collective three-round pace — that will represent the eighth-best showing by a four-round field all season.

Most of the seven that would rank ahead of the BMW Championship — the Shriners, Sony, Barbasol, Safeway, Nelson, Zozo and Amex — are Fall or alternate field events where the purse is substantially smaller.

What really drives home the idea that Caves Creek has been set up as a birdie fest is the comparison with scores from previous iterations of the BMW Championship.

Simply put, the field is virtually certain to set a record for low field average since the tournament became part of the Tour Championship Series back in 2007…and it’s not especially close. The previous record, 8.55 strokes under par at Aronimink in 2018, is a full stroke and a half less.

In stark contrast, last year, when the BMW Championship was staged at Olympia Fields, the four-round field average was 305.5, a full 25 strokes over par.

That means the BMW Championship field performance is projected to decline more than 35 strokes – about 12.5 percent – just from that tournament to this one. Such one-season performance changes are unheard of on Tour. Compared with the Olympia Fields of 2020, the Caves Creek of 2021 is a virtual pitch and putt.

A look at the single-round performance sheets for this season confirms the impression that the playoffs have been turned into a binge-fest.

Of the 10 lowest scoring rounds on Tour all season, three have unfolded in the last two weeks. The other seven, by the way, are without exception from filler events.

(This list exempts the Tournament of Champions, a select winners-only event.)

Here’s the list:

Rank      Event                Round   Avg. (to par)

1              Sony Open          3              -3.34

2              Nelson                 1              -3.23

3              Zozo                     2              -3.13

4              RSM                      4              -2.95

5              BMW                    1              -2.79

6              BMW                    3              -2.73

7              Northern Trust  3              -2.71

8              Zozo                     3              -2.59

9              Sony                     4              -2.53

10           Shriners               3              -2.48

It would be nice to think that this scoring splurge is merely a reflection of the overall improved quality of PGA Tour play. The data, however, does not support that conclusion. The overall scoring average on Tour this season is a hair over 71 strokes. That puts it on course to be the highest season-long scoring average in 15 seasons.

This is not (necessarily) to call into question the talent of the players posting these absurdly low scores. It is to say that those players are beating up on generationally weak courses.