Course Preview and Fits: BMW Championship

Round 1 of the FedEx Cup Playoffs is in the books, and we seem to be witnessing the most unlikely career renaissance of all time in Lucas Glover’s recent dominance. The dude legitimately couldn’t putt for 10 years, gets an Adam Scott putter, and now he’s Tiger Woods? Golf is so weird. Anyhow, even though we might as well just give him the cup and save some time, we still need to play out these next two events, starting with the BMW Championship this week, where the top 50 on the points list make the trip to Chicagoland to tee it up at Olympia Fields in another no-cut event. Let us investigate.

Olympia Fields is about as storied a course as you’ll find in this country, and yet it isn’t as well-known as many of the other old-guard courses because it has been played only sporadically over the years. It has hosted two U.S. Opens and two PGA Championships, but none since Jim Furyk won the U.S. Open here in 2003. The 2015 U.S. Amateur was contested here, where Jon Rahm made the quarterfinals and Bryson DeChambeau took home the hardware, and the 2020 iteration of the BMW was played here just a few years ago, but this course isn’t a well-known entity on tour. Still, with a big event here just a few years ago, and this year’s setup seemingly identical, we can paint a pretty good picture of how the course will play this week.

Playing to a par of 70 and just under 7,400 yards, Olympia Fields is a brute, and snaps us out of the stretch of shorter courses we’ve seen of late. There’s a reason it was chosen as a major championship venue, and there’s only so much you can do to dress down a course with that kind of pedigree, so we can expect a stern test this week. While shorter hitters could compete in past weeks, it will be tough for them this week, as players will realistically need to take driver off the tee on the vast majority of holes, with a lot of lengthy par 4s on the docket. Olympia isn’t just long, though; it’s also very tight, with tree-lined fairways that measure just 26 yards wide on average, making them some of the narrowest on tour. The bluegrass rough will be grown out to four inches in length, and if the last edition of the BMW is any indicator, it will be quite penal. We have data from the 2020 BMW, and we will of course use it, but it’s important that we don’t overfit based on an extremely small sample of one event. Still, there are some trends that we’d expect to continue, and the rough penalty is one of them. We can expect finding fairways to be quite difficult this week, as the field hit them less than half of the time in 2020. With such difficult fairways to hit, though, and length being a requirement, this course is an ideal candidate for a bomb-and-gouge approach. Tony Finau was the prime example of that in 2020, when he was one of only five players under par despite hitting only 32% of fairways. He just about led the field in driving distance, though. Interestingly, Brendon Todd finished T8 here in 2020 despite being one of the shortest hitters on tour. But despite also being one of the most accurate drivers of the golf ball, he only hit 55% of fairways. That should get the point across that it is HARD to find the short grass here, and we’ll see a lot of hacking out of the rough.