Large-Field GPP Breakdown: BMW Championship

We are on to the second round of the PGA Tour FedEx playoffs! If that doesn’t do anything for you golf fans, honestly, I don’t know what will. Obviously, I am kidding here. The FedEx Cup Playoffs are generally known as a total drag with low stakes, which is what you typically get when you have smaller fields, no cut, and a lot of guaranteed money. It’s almost as if it would be very stupid to create a whole league around that concept! Let’s hope no one does that anytime soon. While the excitement for the playoffs for the general golf fan may not be that high, those of us who play DFS on DraftKings should be quite excited this week. DK has given us a MEGA Milly contest for the BMW over the last couple of years and did not stray from that formula here in 2026. In this article, we’ll go through the large-field Sand Trap as we always do, but I’ll try to mix in some thoughts on the $4,444 as well. Let’s get started.

FedEx St. Jude Championship – Recap

Last week was probably one of my worst weeks ever in PGA Classic, which seems to be a trend for the St. Jude Championship based on my previous BMW articles. Maybe next year, I should skip out on it so I can save my money for the later playoff events. The biggest issue was not necessarily that I faded Scottie Scheffler (not a FFNQA), but I got destroyed by chalk Hideki Matsuyama, Tom Kim, and others that filled out Scheffler lineups. Just an all-around bad week, but I’d do it again without question. Some weeks just don’t work out for us in DFS. I did, however, see a decent amount of screenshots in Discord once again, so we can be happy about that. Let’s take a look at the winning lineup in the Sand Trap:

• It featured a 13/8/7/7/6/6 build, which was one of the most common combinations, especially in the Scottie universe of lineups. In my Scheffler lineups last week, I actually went MIN-2 of the $8K players, thinking that would be a weird way to play Scottie. I was correct, so I feel good about how I maximized my Scottie exposure despite the really bad week financially. 
• The lineup came in at 73% cumulative ownership, just within my 70-90% range that I use for Signature Events. My call here was correct, which makes me feel good about my process of roster construction and rules. Sometimes, there are just weeks where the players don’t work out.

I don’t have many takeaways from the St. Jude other than what’s above, and I have a lot to get to for the BMW, so we’ll keep this short and move to the BMW now. 

BMW Championship – Preview

For those of you who don’t know, the BMW Championship has historically been the “second round” of the FedEx Cup playoffs since around 2007. While the field size has changed a bit, we have seen this 50-player field since 2022. Either way, the BMW has always been a limited-field, no-cut event. Because of the dynamics of a smaller field, we’re going to have to play DFS a little differently this week, but I’ll get more into that in the Contrarian Ideas portion of this article.

This year’s edition of the BMW will be played at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis, and it looks like we have some boots on the ground in Discord (Mandos, Bad Guy). The last time Bellerive had a PGA Tour event was in 2018 when it hosted the PGA Championship, so we really don’t have a bunch of course history stuff to go off of. In addition to that, I expect that the field will overplay course fit, as they always do, based on the limited data we have. Here was the leaderboard for the 2018 PGA Championship:

• Winner: Brooks Koepka (-16)

• Runner-up: Tiger Woods (-14)

• 3rd Place: Adam Scott (-13), 4th Place: Stewart Cink (-11), Jon Rahm (-11)

Generally, Bellerive is known as a course that you need to win OTT, specifically in distance. That being said, it’s not necessarily a “bomb and gouge” birdie fest, so the field will be looking at overall driving success as well as long irons when these guys approach the green. If you want to know more about the course, read McKinley’sCourse Preview and Fits article, as always. While I obviously value which stats seem to correlate to success on a course, I am hyper-cognizant of the fact that the majority of the field has access to the same information I do, and the field may also overplay players because course fit is one of the metrics they can “control” in DFS this week. We will, of course, have to see how ownership breaks to determine if that’s the case.