Matt Kuchar Remains Atop FedExCup Standings At Midway Point

Halfway home, the FedExCup’s next stop will be at the BMW Championship at Cog Hill Golf and Country Club just outside Chicago. Matt Kuchar, who leads the tour with 10 top-ten finishes this season, sits atop the Cup standings after two of the four playoff events.

On his tail is last week’s winner, Charley Hoffman, who seized the Deutsche Bank Championship with a five-shot win over Geoff Ogilvy, Luke Donald and Jason Day. Day, Donald and Steve Stricker round out an elusive top five, given that any player within the top five has the opportunity to claim the Cup with a win at The Tour Championship, the fourth and final playoff event.

Phil Mickelson, who spent most of the year in the top five, has sputtered over the past few weeks and now sits in 14th place and needs two excellent weeks to be in the race for the $10 million first-place prize. Also in the mix is Tiger Woods, whose No. 1 world ranking has been hanging on by a thread over the past few months. He needs to play well to advance to The Tour Championships top-30 field. However, Woods has history on his side, seeing that he is a five-time winner at Cog Hill, including last year’s BMW, with nine top-10 finishes over the years.

Notables who didn’t qualify for this weeks event are Padraig Harrington and Lucas Glover, who have four major titles between them. Davis Love III also didn’t make the elite 70 player field. Love, who is a 20 time winner on Tour, had a lackluster playoffs, a T31 at the Barclays and a T61 last week was not good enough to qualify for this week.

Surviving is key to the players this week as the field is continuously trimmed throughout the playoffs. The field will be cut from 70 to 30 players at the end of this week.

The BMW Championship will begin Thursday, Sept.9.