The Barclays 2015: Tee times, pairings for Thursday’s first round

It’s been a long summer but finally the playoffs are here! The FedExCup starts on Thursday morning with the opening round of its opening event, The Barclays. The FedExCup Playoffs are better than what used to exist during this stretch of the calendar on Tour, but no one confuses this contrived postseason setup with some sort of climax to the season.

The majors are on a different plane than the playoffs, WGCs, The Players, or any other tournament that’s tried to upset the status quo. That being said, this is still a fine alternative that draws almost every top player on tour (in the world) during a stretch that used to be hit-or-miss. So instead of folding things up for the year after the PGA Championship in early August, there’s a boatload of cash to play for across four playoff-style events.

The Barclays is always first up and rotates to a host of different venues around the New York metropolitan area. This year, it is Plainfield Country Club’s turn to host the postseason opener. The event used to be the Westchester Classic, which started in 1967 and was always played at Westchester Country Club. Now it bounces around several New Jersey setups and Bethpage Black on Long Island. It’s the only PGA Tour stop in the New York area, which often gets a major every other year or so.

Plainfield is a classic Donald Ross design. It hosted The Barclays just once, back in 2011 when Dustin Johnson won it during a truncated three-round event affected by awful weather. The pros tend to appreciate these classic setups, which are a nice change of pace from the usual TPC tracks that dot the tour schedule and can get monotonously long. The top 125 in the FedExCup standings get the invite to this first event, and 25 are sent home before next week’s trip to the Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston.

Not all 125 players will tee it up this week, however, as some choose to rest with injuries and are able to sit on their points accrued from the season to feel safe for the last three legs. Rory McIlroy, Louis Oosthuizen, Sergio Garcia, Francesco Molinari and Retief Goosen are the five not playing this week. Goosen starts the week at 111th in the standings, so his season is over. McIlroy, with his WGC win and Wells Fargo win this season, is inside the top 10 in the standings and thought it best to take another week off and rest his ankle. So the tour has some flexibility here will a smaller than normal field. They will still send them off split tees in groups of three for the first two rounds.

The headliner this week is Jordan Spieth, who has an enormous lead in the standings after his four-win season. Spieth will play with Jason Day and Bubba Watson, the next two stars behind him in the standings. That’s generally the custom for the first two rounds at these playoff events, where the standings sort everything. The Spieth-Day-Bubba group is set to go off 8:26 a.m. ET on Thursday. Here’s the full tee sheet for Thursday’s opening round:

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