Tour Outsider: BMW Championship

This is week the US PGA Tour heads to the midwest for the second event of the Fed Ex Cup Playoff to play the BMW Championship.

Let's look at the Golf CLi and see who the top 15 players are for the tournament ranked by the CLi figure.

CLi Strength: Top 15 -7.69 | Field -0.19 Rank Player CLi 1 S Sergio Garcia 3.25 2 S Vijay Singh 7.25 3 S Carl Pettersson 10.15 4 S Ben Curtis 11.20 5 S Jim Furyk 11.75 6 S Mike Weir 14.65 7 S Camilo Villegas 14.95 8 S Tim Clark 15.50 9 S Ernie Els 16.05 10 S Stuart Appleby 17.25 11 S Angel Cabrera 19.95 12 S Steve Stricker 22.20 13 S Phil Mickelson 23.35 14 S Tim Herron 23.45 15 S Mark Wilson 24.40

I am behind in posting my picks this week as I was in several PhD seminars this week. The reading load has ramped up in the doctorate program, and that makes it tough to do much else than read. It is a good thing that I like to read.

Now on to the picks. This week is a new venue for the BMW Championship (formerly the Western Open). It has moved this year from Chicago, Illinois (Cog Hill) to St. Louis, Missouri (Bellerive Country Club). So much of the importance on the historical data for this tournament that can be used to help predict how players will play in this tournament gets minimized. So the Golf CLi calculation puts more weight on how players are playing leading up to the tournament. As you can see from the Golf CLi rankings list above, most of the players in the top 15 have been playing well of late.

I am going to with the top 2 in the list (Garcia and Singh), will skip over Pettersson (unknown factor this week), and then go with Curtis, Furyk and Weir.

I skipped over Singh last week in the Deutsch Bank U.S. Championship thinking he was tired. However, he ended up winning the event. Hopefully he keeps his energy level up for another 4 rounds this week.

Then I hope that Weir continues to make every putt he looks at. Last week in the Deutsche, his putting was awesome. Hopefully he takes that confidence with the flat stick and puts it to good use in St. Louis this week.

So the Tour Outsider picks for the BMW Championship are:

Rank Player CLi 1 S Sergio Garcia 3.25 2 S Vijay Singh 7.25 3 S Ben Curtis 11.20 4 S Jim Furyk 11.75 5 S Mike Weir 14.65

The Tour Insider's (Dave Shedloski) picks are:

• 1 Jim Furyk
• 2 Vijay Singh
• 3 Justin Leonard
• 4 Erine Els
• 5 Kenny Perry

We have 2 players in common in this tournament: Furyk and Singh.