The scramble to make the FedEx Cup top 30 leads to plenty of drama at Caves Valley

OWINGS MILLS, Md. (AP) — Akshay Bhatia holed out a wedge for an eagle, then one-upped himself with an ace. Rickie Fowler rolled in a 57-foot putt for birdie. Taylor Pendrith's first tee shot went way left, causing him to re-hit.

Normally, those shots would be mere footnotes by players who aren't really in contention, but at the BMW Championship, the leaders aren't the only ones with a lot to play for.

The top 30 players in the FedEx Cup standings make it to next week's Tour Championship, and Sunday's final round at Caves Valley will be make or break for those on the bubble. Take Bhatia, who came into this event ranked 29th and shot a first-round 75 but has rebounded nicely since then. A 66 on Saturday — featuring those two sensational shots — left him at even par, and he's now projected at 28th in the FedEx Cup.

“Even when I’m putting, I try and see where my FedEx is projected,” Bhatia said. “Something that I’m aware of and need to, again, focus on what I’m trying to do. But just the nature of the game. You just want to know where you’re at.”

After Saturday's third round, the last three players projected in the top 30 were Bhatia, Michael Kim and Sungjae Im. The first three out were Chris Gotterup, Fowler and Pendrith.

Fowler narrowly finished in the top 70 in the FedEx Cup to reach the first postseason event in Tennessee, then narrowly moved into the top 50 to make it to Caves Valley. Now he has a chance to narrowly reach the top 30 and move on to next week's Tour Championship at East Lake — with its $40 million purse.

Call it golf's version of survive and advance.

Fowler was 48th entering the BMW Championship and is now projected at 32nd after three rounds. He had three straight birdies on the back nine — including the long putt on No. 15 — and is in a three-way tie for eighth this week with Kim and Viktor Hovland.

“Obviously, top five I know will lock it,” Fowler said. “There’s a few other factors outside of that depending on finish from there. But go put together a nice round tomorrow and we’ll be good.”

Kim began the tournament in 42nd place and has moved up to 29th. He made a double bogey on No. 15, then birdied 16 and nearly holed out from a bunker on the par-3 17th — all events that impacted Kim and those competing with him to make the top 30.

Pendrith's round began with that horrendous tee shot, and he needed to hit out of a bunker to 18 inches to salvage a double bogey on No. 1. He played fine after that, but it's fair to wonder if that one big mistake could be the difference between making it to East Lake and being left out.

“Just a little bit of a shock to the system,” Pendrith said. “I have been driving it really nicely all week, and yeah, I don’t really know where that came from. Just a bad swing.”

The margin of error is small for Pendrith. It was bigger for Im, who entered the tournament in 25th place but shot 75 and 77 the last two days to fall to 30th.

Harry Hall has made the biggest move up this week, jumping from 45th to 25th. He's tied for fourth in the tournament, eight strokes behind leader Robert MacIntyre.

As for Bhatia, he's basically back where he started, but it was an eventful trip. He holed a sand wedge from 93 yards on the par-4 seventh, then aced the 227-yard 17th with a 5-iron. The latter shot won him a BMW, which he said he might give to his caddie.

It's fair to say that 75 a couple days earlier was well in the rear-view mirror.

“Took myself out of the tournament pretty quick,” Bhatia said. “But I felt like if I can kind of go shoot 2 under each day, it’s a nice goal, just because if I get it to 1 under par with how hard this golf course is, you just never know. Again, every shot counts. I don’t want to just shrug it in and not make it to the finish line. I want to try everything I can. Yesterday I finished nice, and today was even better.”

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Taylor Pendrith, of Canada, hits from the fourth tee during the third round of the BMW Championship golf tournament Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025, in Owings Mills, Md. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

Michael Kim hits on the fourth hole during the third round of the BMW Championship golf tournament Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025, in Owings Mills, Md. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

Rickie Fowler hits from the seventh tee during the first round of the BMW Championship golf tournament Thursday, Aug. 14, 2025, in Owings Mills, Md. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)

Akshay Bhatia hits from the seventh tee during the first round of the BMW Championship golf tournament Thursday, Aug. 14, 2025, in Owings Mills, Md. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)

The Pentagon said Thursday that it is changing the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes so it concentrates on “reporting for our warfighters” and no longer includes “woke distractions.”

That message, in a social media post from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's spokesman, is short on specifics and does not mention the news outlet's legacy of independence from government and military leadership. It comes a day after The Washington Post reported that applicants for jobs at Stars and Stripes were being asked what they would do to support President Donald Trump's policies.

Stars and Stripes traces its lineage to the Civil War and has reported news about the military either in its newspaper or online steadily since World War II, largely to an audience of service members stationed overseas. Roughly half of its budget comes from the Pentagon and its staff members are considered Defense Department employees.

The outlet's mission statement emphasizes that it is “editorially independent of interference from outside its own editorial chain-of-command” and that it is unique among news organizations tied to the Defense Department in being “governed by the principles of the First Amendment.”

Congress established that independence in the 1990s after instances of military leadership getting involved in editorial decisions. During Trump's first term in 2020, Defense Secretary Mark Esper tried to eliminate government funding for Stars and Stripes — to effectively shut it down — before he was overruled by the president.

Hegseth's spokesman, Sean Parnell, said on X Thursday that the Pentagon “is returning Stars and Stripes to its original mission: reporting for our warfighters.” He said the department will “refocus its content away from woke distractions.”

“Stars and Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters,” Parnell wrote. “It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”

Parnell did not return a message seeking details. The Daily Wire reported, after speaking a Pentagon spokeswoman, that the plan is to have all Stars and Stripes content written by active-duty service members. Currently, Congress has mandated that the publication's publisher and top editor be civilians, said Max Lederer, its publisher.

The Pentagon also said that half of the outlet's content would be generated by the Defense Department, and that it would no longer publish material from The Associated Press or Reuters news services.

Also Thursday, the Pentagon issued a statement in the Federal Register that it would eliminate some 1990s era directives that governed how Stars and Stripes operates. Lederer said it's not clear what that would mean for the outlet's operations, or whether the Defense Department has the authority to do so without congressional authorization.

The publisher said he believes that Stars and Stripes is valued by the military community precisely because of its independence as a news organization. He said no one at the Pentagon has communicated to him what it wants from Stars and Stripes; he first learned of its intentions from reading Parnell's social media post.

“This will either destroy the value of the organization or significantly reduce its value,” Lederer said.

Jacqueline Smith, the outlet's ombudsman, said Stars and Stripes reports on matters important to service members and their families — not just weapons systems or war strategy — and she's detected nothing “woke” about its reporting.

“I think it's very important that Stars and Stripes maintains its editorial independence, which is the basis of its credibility,” Smith said. A longtime newspaper editor in Connecticut, Smith's role was created by Congress three decades ago and she reports to the House Armed Services Committee.

It's the latest move by the Trump administration to impose restrictions on journalists. Most reporters from legacy news outlets have left the Pentagon rather than to agree to new rules imposed by Hegseth that they feel would give him too much control over what they report and write. The New York Times has sued to overturn the regulations.

Trump has also sought to shut down government-funded outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that report independent news about the world in countries overseas.

Also this week, the administration raided the home of a Washington Post journalist as part of an investigation into a contractor accused of stealing government secrets, a move many journalists interpreted as a form of intimidation.

The Post reported that applicants to Stars and Stripes were being asked how they would advance Trump's executive orders and policy priorities in the role. They were asked to identify one or two orders or initiatives that were significant to them. That raised questions about whether it was appropriate for a journalist to be given what is, in effect, a loyalty test.

Smith said it was the government's Office of Personnel Management — not the newspaper — that was responsible for the question on job applications and said it was consistent with what was being asked of applicants for other government jobs.

But she said it was not something that should be asked of journalists. “The loyalty is to the truth, not the administration,” she said.

David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

US soldier Sgt. John Hubbuch of Versailles, Ky., one of the members of NATO led-peacekeeping forces in Bosnia reads Stars and Stripes newspaper on Sunday Feb. 14, 1999. (AP Photo/Amel Emric, File)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stands outside the Pentagon during a welcome ceremony for Japanese Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi at the Pentagon, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf/)

FILE - A GI with the U.S. 25th division reads Stars and Stripes newspaper at Cu Chi, South Vietnam on Sept. 10, 1969. (AP Photo/Mark Godfrey)