TOUR Championship 2015: Tee times, pairings for Saturday’s third round

The FedExCup largely works as a meaningful stretch of PGA Tour golf after the season’s final major. It’s better than what existed before it, a mostly barren stretch of the circuit that no one really paid attention to for most of August and September. But there are still flaws in the system and challenges, some of which just might be insurmountable. One of the biggest is figuring out a schedule that avoids head-to-head competition with football, a sport that swallows everything else whole on fall weekends.

Saturday’s round is another example of the tour trying to dodge the football behemoth and bending its schedule to play one of its last two rounds of the season in a pretty crappy time slot. CBS, which televises more PGA Tour events than any other network, parts with golf after the Barclays in late August. They have SEC football on Saturdays and AFC football on Sundays, so it makes sense.

NBC takes over for the last three legs of the postseason, and they have less football conflicts -- no NFL during the day and a handful of Notre Dame home games on Saturdays. Unfortunately for the tour, the Irish are at home on Sat., so NBC, the Golf Channel and the PGA Tour have scheduled the third round hours earlier than normal.

While the first group did not go off until almost noon ET for the first two rounds, the tour will send the first of 14 pairings at 9:40 a.m. on Saturday. The leaders will be out well before noon. It’s all done in an effort to get a 3:30 p.m. finish, which is kickoff for Notre Dame-UMass in South Bend. Typically, the tour would set the tee sheet for a 6-7 p.m. finish on Sat. at one of their bigger events. But football rules this time of year and NBC is not going to choose golf over Notre Dame.

NBC and the tour have a pretty attractive final pairing, too. It’s not the first choice but it could be way worse. Jordan Spieth and Henrik Stenson -- who both entered the postseason finale inside the top five in the FedExCup standings and would win it all with a win this week -- will play together in the third round. They anchor the tee sheet at 11:30 a.m. Stenson holds a multi-shot cushion, thanks in large part to that unconscious 8-under through 12 holes start he had to the tourney on Thursday. But Spieth posted the low round of the day on Fri., one of his best in more than a month, to move into solo second and that final tee time.

The course took on buckets of rain Thurs. night and Fri. morning, and it drizzled more throughout the second round. There has not been enough to delay play or even force the tour to put lift, clean and place in effect. More showers are in the forecast for Saturday morning, but again, it might just be a nuisance and not enough to stop play. The course will be soft but with just 28 players in the field, it’s pretty hard to get too far off schedule. Here’s the full tee sheet for Saturday’s third round: