BMW Championship
Owings Mills, Maryland
Caves Valley Golf Club - Par 70 - 7,601 yards
Field - 49 entrants
Purse - $20M
The Preview
We were treated to a thrilling overtime finish during the first leg of the FedExCup Playoffs where Justin Rose outlasted J.J. Spaun in what became a three-hole duel, while the PGA Tour's remaining player pool for the 2025 campaign has been cut down to the top-50 in points ahead of the BMW Championship, which is being hosted by Caves Valley Golf Club for the first time since 2021. The venue has been lengthened to north of 7,600 yards despite its reduction to a par 70 on the scorecard, so this should lend the bombers an advantage after a couple weeks of precision practice in Greensboro and Memphis. Expect long-iron play to factor heavily into the mix as well, given 39.3 percent of approaches were struck from 200-plus here four years ago.
Recent Champions
2024 - Keegan Bradley (Castle Pines)
2023 - Viktor Hovland (Olympia Fields)
2022 - Patrick Cantlay (Wilmington)
2021 - Patrick Cantlay (Caves Valley)
2020 - Jon Rahm (Olympia Fields)
2019 - Justin Thomas (Medinah)
2018 - Keegan Bradley (Aronimink)
2017 - Marc Leishman (Conway Farms)
2016 - Dustin Johnson (Crooked Stick)
2015 - Jason Day (Conway Farms)
Key Stats to Victory
SG: Off-the-Tee
Driving distance
Proximity: 175-plus yards
Birdie or better percentage
Yahoo Value Picks
Based on $200 salary cap
Cream of the Crop
Scottie Scheffler - $45
The No. 1 player in the world by a wide margin ranked top-4 among the FedEx St. Jude Championship field in both SG: Off-the-Tee and GIR percentage last week at TPC Southwind, racking up 23 total birdies in the process. Continuing to sound like a broken record here, but Yahoo's $45 maximum salary is imbalanced with Scheffler's absurd floor/ceiling combination. He deserves to be priced in the mid-$50s at this point.
Rory McIlroy - $44
McIlroy should be well rested after skipping out on the humidity in Memphis following a T6-T2-T7 stretch from the Travelers Championship through The Open Championship, and he placed solo-fourth here at Caves Valley back in 2021 when he gained 4.6 strokes with the flat stick. He's top-3 on Tour in both SG: OTT and driving distance this season, and Yahoo's soft pricing makes it easy to stack McIlroy with Scheffler up top.
Glue Guys
Ludvig Aberg - $34
The 25-year-old Swede ranks top-10 on Tour in both SG: OTT and Prox: 200-plus, making him quite an admirable course fit for a lengthy Caves Valley Golf Club. He's coming off a T9 in Memphis where he finished third among the St. Jude field in driving distance and fifth in SG: OTT.
Tommy Fleetwood - $33
His inability to close out tournaments is an obvious issue, but at an underpriced $33 salary, he's more than good enough to return value from a Yahoo DFS perspective without landing atop the podium come Sunday afternoon. Over his last 24 measured rounds, Fleetwood is top-10 in each of SG: Approach, SG: Putting, Prox: 200-plus and Bogey Avoidance.
Bargain Bin
Patrick Cantlay - $27
This is a miscalculation on Cantlay's salary after notching a T9 result last week at TPC Southwind where he ranked fourth among the field in both SG: APP and GIR percentage. Additionally, he won here at Caves Valley back in 2021 when he reached the 27-under-par mark, gaining an incredible 14.6 strokes putting in the process.
Sam Burns - $25
Burns hasn't been playing his best golf since traveling across the pond and back, but he harnesses the power that may be required to keep up in Owings Mills this week, and he just led the FedEx St. Jude Championship field in SG: Putting, notably closing with scores of 66-68 on Saturday and Sunday. He placed eighth at the 2021 BMW Championship when he ranked sixth among the field in SG: OTT and T8 in driving distance.
Cameron Young - $20
Young didn't budge from the $20 minimum salary despite his recent Win-T5 run at the Wyndham Championship and the FedEx St. Jude Championship, so he figures to be an extremely popular building block in stars-and-scrubs lineups this week. In turn, this assumes he'll often be combined with the aforementioned Scheffler-McIlroy stack, so it'll be important to get unique elsewhere if deploying this three-man structure in order to avoid dupes. Not only can Young be an elite driver/putter type, but he's also gained over three strokes on approach in back-to-back starts for the first time since March of 2024.
Looking for the best golf picks on Yahoo? Find the top Yahoo PGA DFS picks and value plays for every tournament from RotoWire golf expert Bryce Danielson.
