Scottie Scheffler shows up at Bellerive nearly 1,450 points clear of Matt Fitzpatrick, a lead big enough that the BMW Championship should be a coronation. It won’t necessarily play out that way. The FedEx Cup tends to reward whoever gets hot at the right moment, no matter how the rest of the season went. Just look at last year: Tommy Fleetwood hadn’t won all season, then walked into East Lake and left with the trophy. Scheffler, Fitzpatrick, and Cameron Young enter the second leg of the FedEx Cup Playoffs as the three names worth watching at Bellerive.

There’s more on the line here than the trophy. Only the top 30 in the standings make it to East Lake, and the BMW has a track record of rewarding whoever’s already in form: 13 of the last 14 winners had a top-12 finish somewhere in their previous four starts. Then there’s the course. Bellerive plays long and hard, 7,448 yards at par 70, with thick rough and big greens that punish anyone spraying it off the tee. When the course last hosted a major back in 2018, it was the bombers, Brooks Koepka, Tiger Woods, Jon Rahm, who filled out the top 10.

Scottie Scheffler

Scheffler’s eight-shot victory at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, his second win of the season, vaulted him to over 4,100 FedEx Cup points, nearly 1,450 clear of Fitzpatrick in second. Outside those two wins, his season has been defined by consistency: a runner-up at the Masters, top-5 finishes at the U.S. Open and Open Championship, and a T-14 at the PGA Championship.

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Scheffler also arrives as the defending champion. Last August at Caves Valley, he chased down Robert MacIntyre and won it with a chip-in birdie on the 17th. Win again at Bellerive and he’d be the first multi-time BMW champion since the format changed, but the bigger prize is the one still missing from his shelf: a FedEx Cup, despite being the sport’s most consistent player all year.

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Matt Fitzpatrick

Fitzpatrick ranks second with 3,329 points, and it’s not hard to see why: 2026 has been the best season of his career. He kicked it off with the Valspar Championship in March, his first PGA Tour title since 2023, then beat Scottie Scheffler in a playoff at the RBC Heritage. A third win followed at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans.

While his major record hasn’t grown in 2026, Fitzpatrick’s consistency elsewhere has been remarkable: his only major title came at the 2022 U.S. Open, where he held off Scottie Scheffler and Will Zalatoris.

He’s also got something Scheffler is the only other player in this group to have shown: he’s won in back-to-back weeks already this season, closing out the RBC Heritage and then the Zurich Classic. Backing up a win the following week is hard to do, and he’s already proven he can.

There’s more than FedEx Cup points riding on this for Fitzpatrick, too. He finished T-17 at the BMW last year, and a win at Bellerive would be his fourth title of the season, enough to put him squarely in the Player of the Year conversation.

Cameron Young

Young closes out the trio with 3,161 points. He didn’t win his first PGA Tour title until the 2025 Wyndham Championship, and this March he went bigger, beating Fitzpatrick by a stroke at the Players Championship. Between that, the Cadillac Championship, and a T-3 at the Masters, he’s climbed all the way to World No. 3, a career high.

His major results back that up: T-3 at the Masters, T-26 at the PGA Championship, T-43 at the U.S. Open, and a runner-up finish at the Open.

Scheffler and Fitzpatrick can both point to a win backed up the following week. Young can’t, not yet. But he’s shown something just as useful: he beat Fitzpatrick head-to-head down the stretch at TPC Sawgrass, which says plenty about how he handles a leaderboard when it actually matters.

Young finished 11th at the BMW Championship last year, and a strong week at Bellerive could finally bank him a trophy after a season of near misses.

Each of these three contenders arrives at Bellerive with a different storyline behind them, and there’s no telling yet who walks away with it. Scheffler’s lead is commanding, but Bellerive’s long, demanding layout could just as easily favor Fitzpatrick’s precision or Young’s power off the tee.