There is no cut at this week’s 70-man BMW Championship. That’s good news for Jordan Spieth. It’s also good news for the hotel he’s staying at.
“When they ask what day I'm checking out, I can say, "I'm checking out on Sunday,”’ Spieth said with a grin. “It's nice.”
Generally, you wouldn’t think the world’s No. 2-ranked player – who counts two majors among his four wins this season – would worry about such mundane things as merely making a cut. But given that Spieth has missed the cut in the first two events of the Playoffs and has dropped to – omigosh – No. 2 in FedExCup points, he’s looking forward to actually playing four consecutive rounds of golf this week.
Of course, Spieth was gently just mocking the overreaction from the masses after he failed to make the cut at The Barclays and the Deutsche Bank Championship. Given the what’s-wrong-with-Spieth firestorm that he saw developing on social media, you would have thought his entire career had been torn to shreds after four consecutive rounds over par.
The bottom line from Spieth’s perspective: His game is fine. He’s not panicking. He just missed two cuts. They aren’t the first two that he’s missed and they certainly won’t be the last two.
“There wasn’t a letdown this year,” Spieth said Tuesday. “I just had two bad weeks. Just leave it at that. … You’re going to have two bad days in a row every now and then.”
If anything, the reaction to his last two performances is a reflection on just how high the standards are now for Spieth, whose consistency throughout the 2014-15 season had been overshadowed by his chase of the single-season Grand Slam.
If you look at his last 25 starts on all tours going back to last year’s Dunlop Phoenix Open in Japan, this is the third “down” cycle.
The first came at the Farmers Insurance Open, when he missed the cut after four starts that included two wins and two other top 10s.
The second came after his win at the Masters. He played the next week at RBC Heritage and finished T-11. He failed to advance beyond the group stage at the World Golf Championships-Cadillac Match Play, and then missed the cut at THE PLAYERS.
And now he’s missed two consecutive cuts after a six-tournament stretch in which he won twice (including the U.S. Open), finished top-5 in the other two majors and top-10 in the other two starts.
The sky is falling! At least that’s what Spieth felt as he checked his social media accounts, especially with fellow young guns Jason Day and Rickie Fowler winning the first two Playoffs events.
“I’m not aware of the specifics of what Joe sitting on his couch in Montana thinks about my golf game, but … it’s interesting how it’s a what-can-you-do-for-me now when the spotlight is on,” Spieth said.
“I’m that way with sports teams, so why can’t people be that way with me? Everyone has their opinions, and the hardest thing for me to do is to not react to that. … You just need to keep your head down, stay focused and try to be the guy that people are talking about next week.”
Since Spieth has a top-five spot locked up for next week’s TOUR Championship by Coca-Cola – meaning he’ll be able to control his own destiny in chasing the FedExCup at East Lake – he plans to be aggressive this week. He calls it a “free-rolling scenario.”
Perhaps that will lead to a fast start, something he didn’t have in New Jersey or Boston. He opened with a 74 at The Barclays and a 75 at the Deutsche Bank, and failed to generate a second-round rally to slip into the weekend.
Something else that might help is how he’s performed the week prior to big events – and he considers the TOUR Championship and the FedExCup as his last big individual goal of the season.
Prior to the Masters, he tied for second at the Shell Houston Open. Prior to the U.S. Open, he tied for third at the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide. Prior to The Open Championship, he won the John Deere Classic.
“I feel very confident about where I’m at right this second,” Spieth said. “As the week goes on, probably work more and more again try and peak for next week, approach it like it's a major championship.
“The weeks before majors this year have been good weeks for me, so I feel confident about the way we'll perform this week, as well.”