The Barclays 2015: Tee times, pairings for Saturday’s third round at Plainfield

The first two legs of the FedExCup playoffs do not feature the typical full field of players you get in a regular season tournament. The Barclays includes the top 125 in the FedExCup standings and that’s pared down to 100 for next week’s Deutsche Bank Championship. Those smaller field sizes, however, do not mean there’s no cut as is the case at the World Golf Championships and other limited-field events. Those that struggle through the first two rounds, such as Jordan Spieth this week, are weeded out for the normal and more manageable top 70 players for the weekend.

This year’s Barclays started with just 120 players; five, including Rory McIlroy and Sergio Garcia, decided to rest or skip the event for one reason or another. A withdrawal from Erik Compton and the cut reduced the group by 48 more players, leaving 72 in the field for the final 36 holes.

With that normal sized group for the weekend, the Tour will send them all off No. 1 in twosomes for Saturday’s third round. Henrik Stenson and Bubba Watson, two of the more accomplished and wealthy players in the field, will anchor the tee sheet in that final group at 2 p.m. ET. Watson has held the lead or co-lead for most of the tournament since he teed it up bright and early Thursday morning. He started the postseason No. 3 in the standings but a win would bump him two spots to No. 1 heading into next week’s event in Boston.

These postseason tournaments obviously hand out more FedExCup points than the regular season events, and the 2,000 points given to the winner would be enough to vault Bubba over Jordan Spieth and his dominant regular season points total. Stenson is no stranger himself to accruing FedExCup points and navigating this four-event postseason successfully. He cruised to the 2013 FedExCup title and was the hottest player in the world for the month of September, winning in Boston and in Atlanta at the Tour Championship finale. Now he’s back in the hunt at the Barclays and looking for another $10 million bonus windfall to cap an average season for the world class Swede.

With Jordan Spieth missing the cut, Tiger Woods not qualified and Rory McIlroy resting his ankle for one more week, this final weekend before football could be tough going for the Tour. But Bubba and Stenson are a solid final pairing. Here’s the full tee sheet for Saturday at Plainfield.