This week the PGA Tour heads to the Chicago area for the second FedEx Cup Playoff event, the BMW Championship. The host course, Olympia Fields, is a traditional parklands course that plays extremely long and difficult. Players will be hitting fewer fairways, fewer greens, and have longer approach shots than a normal week on the PGA Tour. As such, we need to focus our efforts on players who are elite off the tee (especially with driving distance) and excel around the green, as everyone is going to miss a lot of greens and it is very difficult to get up and down with the thick rough and deep bunkers around these putting surfaces.
With only 50 players in this field and most of the top players in the world present, I’m not going to sit here and recommend the obvious top players as you already know who they are. Instead, let’s take a look at two longshot options for this week who could make the difference in your DraftKings lineup:
Cameron Davis $7,800
Davis comes into this event under the radar even though he has top 10 finishes in each of the last three weeks. He ranks top 15 in this field in driving distance, birdies, off the tee, and around the green. That’s pretty much the perfect combination for success this week. To make things even better, Davis gets to putt on bentgrass greens, where he ranks 19th in this field compared to 43rd on Bermuda grass greens.
Byeong Hun An $7,500
Ben An ranks third in the field in driving distance. He has gained strokes off the tee in his last 11 events, including at least 3.6 shots on seven of those 11 occasions. He comes into this event in good form with a middle of the pack finish last week in Memphis and a runner-up finish two weeks ago at Wyndham. An is great around the green too, ranking ninth. Similar to Davis, he has much better putting splits on Bentgrass vs. Bermuda. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he finished 12th here in 2020. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar finish this week.