BMW Championship 2017 live stream: Tee times, TV schedule, and how to watch Round 1 online

I know you struggled to get through last weekend with your sports viewing options confined to the NFL’s opening week, another fantastic college football Saturday, and the US Open finals. Fortunately for you, the PGA Tour has returned this weekend from its FedExCup hiatus and all will be right with the world. You can go back to ignoring that minor football sport.

The BMW Championship is the traditional third leg of the PGA Tour’s Playoffs system, now in its 11th year. This used to be the Western Open, one of the oldest championships in golf and once considered a major. Now it’s all branded up and a big money modern event that has just 70 players in the field after the two previous postseason stops chopped it down from 125. The FedExCup has found a nice rotation for its postseason, going across four major US cities from New York to Boston to Chicago and then finishing up in Atlanta for the Tour Championship.

The BMW, like the old Western Open, is almost always in Chicago but it does bounce around occasionally under the leadership of the Western Golf Association. It’s gone to Denver, St. Louis, and Indianapolis during the FedExCup era, and hit multiple Chicago-area tracks, including Cog Hill, a traditional Western Open spot. This year, it’s back at Conway Farms, north of the city in the decrepit and rundown suburb of Lake Forest. Conway hosted in 2013 and 2015, two strong iterations of this championship that produced two Hall-of-Fame winners in Jason Day and Zach Johnson. The course is reputed to favor the big hitters, but it’s also the venue where we saw short-hitting Jim Furyk break 60 back in 2013, an all-time round given the scoring conditions that day.

The field is small but it’s obviously loaded with all the top names in the FedExCup standings showing up in Chicago. The first round will be anchored by the top three in the standings — Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, and Dustin Johnson — playing together just after 11:30 a.m. ET. That will be, as you’d expect, one of the featured groups on PGA TOUR LIVE, the Tour’s OTT streaming service. Unfortunately for those who aren’t subscribers, that Big 3 round will be mostly finished before the TV coverage on Golf Channel kicks in at 3 p.m. ET. The afternoon TV broadcast will likely feature a lot of Rickie Fowler, Jon Rahm, and Hideki Matsuyama. Here are all your coverage options for the opening round:

3 to 7 p.m. — Golf Channel

11 a.m. -- PGA Tour Live starts with coverage from range and opening holes.

Featured Groups (PGA Tour Live subscription required):

3 to 7 p.m. — Golf Channel simulcast stream

3 p.m. PGA Tour Live Featured Holes coverage (no subscription required)

1 to 7 p.m. — PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 93/208 and streamed here)

The limited field of just 70 players gives the PGA Tour plenty of wiggle room when it comes to setting the tee sheet. That’s a small field for a PGA Tour event after a cut has been made. So there should be no issue staying on schedule with such a small group from the very start on Thursday. There is no cut at the BMW because of that already-capped number. The Tour, however, will still keep them in groups of three for the first two rounds, but all rolling off No. 1 tee instead of a split tee start. Should the forecast change, they can go to split tees and condense them into a two-hour block or so. For the first round, they will run them all off No. 1 from 10 a.m. until almost 2:30 p.m. ET. Here’s the full tee sheet for Thursday’s opening round in Chicago (all times ET):