The Case for Sam Burns in St. Louis—Our Best Bets for the BMW Championship

Bellerive Country Club is a major championship test that will be tackled by the 50 remaining players in the FedEx Cup Playoffs this week at the BMW Championship. Bellerive has hosted a pair of PGA Championships and a U.S. Open in its history, proving that this will be a battle of the highest order.

The venue will stretch over 7,400 yards as a par-70, so distance off the tee is going to be much more important this week than it was last week. With crowned fairways and reverse cambering in some areas, there’s a difference between landing your ball in the fairway and getting it to stay there. The ability to work the ball in both directions will be a valuable asset in finding the short grass this week.

The greens at Bellerive are large, but that doesn’t make them easy to hit. Approaches will come from longer clubs, and the greens are well protected by undulation and bunkering. This will be a test of execution on nearly every hole, and we will be building our card around battle-tested players.

Burns is the best player on TOUR this year without a victory. He has six top-10 finishes, including four in his last six events. His stat profile in Memphis last week was exactly what you’d like to see from him. He gained +6.01 strokes on approach and tacked on another +4.62 with the putter. When he’s playing his best golf, those are the two facets that really shine.

He certainly could have played better on Sunday last week out of the final group, but I look at that event as a whole. He made double bogey on the third hole twice last week, an easy par-5 that should elicit low scores. He made very few poor swings, but he was punished to the full extent for each one. It’s just a matter of time before Burns breaks through and wins a big tournament.

Scottie Scheffler’s win drought has finally come to an end after more than 200 days between victories. He’s the only player in the world for whom that amount of time between wins can become “concerning.” Scheffler has always been a tee-to-green monster, ranking first on TOUR nearly any way you slice his numbers. However, this year has opened a new era with his flatstick.

In 2026, Scheffler is gaining +0.56 strokes per round on the greens, which marks the best putting season of his career. That prowess has really shown through in the last two weeks, with Scheffler gaining a total of +14.8 strokes putting over those eight rounds. This is the time of year when Scheffler really starts to run away from his peers, and Bellerive should be an excellent place for him to continue the trend.

Scott is one of the handful of players who teed it up at Bellerive in the 2018 PGA Championship, finishing third that week while gaining +9.14 strokes from tee to green. Since then, Scott has only gotten longer off the tee, and his putter is starting to heat up.

He gained +3.71 strokes putting in Memphis last week and has now earned +8.28 strokes on the greens in his last 12 rounds. That has been the one thing holding him back from having an even more successful season than he’s already having. The most impressive part of Scott’s year is that his best finishes have come at world-class venues. He has top-10 finishes at Royal Birkdale, Trump National (Doral), Riviera CC and Royal Melbourne. All of those venues could host a major championship on any day of the year, and Bellerive is no different. Scott’s skill set will be rewarded heavily this week.

After three straight missed cuts from the Charles Schwab Challenge through the U.S. Open, Fowler has gotten back on track, and he is galloping to the finish line of this season. His last four starts have produced three top-25 finishes, with metrics that imply he will continue that trend again this week.

When Fowler is putting well, he’s often near the top of the leaderboard, and that’s exactly what he’s doing right now. During that four-start stretch, he gained +10.82 strokes with the flatstick. Combine that with the 11.28 strokes he’s earned through the ball-striking categories, and we are staring at a complete player. It’s not a huge factor for me this week since we are eight years removed, but Fowler did play in the 2018 PGA Championship at Bellerive, where he finished T12.

If we truly believe that Bellerive is a major championship-caliber test, then we need to consider one of the best major championship players for this week. Xander Schauffele certainly fits that description. He finished inside the top 20 in all four majors this year and has made a habit of finishing on the first page of the leaderboard at the game’s biggest events.

In the last four years, Schauffele’s worst finish at a major is a T28 at the 2025 PGA Championship. Over those 16 starts, he has 10 top-10 finishes and two wins. His recent play has been encouraging, with a T18 at The Open, followed by a runner-up finish in Detroit and a T7 finish last week in Memphis.