OWINGS MILLS, Md. — Robert MacIntyre was able to maintain a healthy advantage on Scottie Scheffler after Moving Day at the 2025 BMW Championship as the world’s No. 1 golfer could only knock one shot off MacIntyre’s lead entering the final round at Caves Valley Golf Club. Scheffler plotted his way around a course that started to get some of its teeth back after two straight days without rain with his typically steady play, but MacIntyre maintained his nearly flawless play, finishing the third round without piling up errors despite an early miscue by bogeying the first hole.
Scheffler’s only real misstep Saturday was leaving his approach in the bunker short of the 12th green from the fairway, leading to his lone bogey of the day. Beyond that, he made four birdies and kept inching closer to the young Scotsman, forcing MacIntyre tl prove that he could hold his nerve, which he will need to do for 18 more holes on Sunday.
Scheffler trimmed his deficit to three at multiple points, but MacIntyre seemed to always have an answer, holding up his end of the bargain well in the zoo that is a final pairing with the game’s top player. Outside of that opening bogey, MacIntyre did well scrambling for pars until he settled down — with no singular effort better than his escape from the trees on the 5th.
On the back nine, MacIntyre got a bit feisty as the crowd was unsurprisingly pulling heavily for Scheffler. That seemed to provide a bit of fuel for the 29-year-old, who delivered some Ryder Cup-worthy reactions to his two biggest putts on the back nine. The first came after a 6-foot par putt on the 14th as he answered a Scheffler birdie that had the grandstands buzzing and prompted one fan to say something that caught MacIntyre’s attention and led to quite the response.
Then on the 18th, with Scheffler in closer, MacIntyre poured in his latest bomb on the Caves Valley greens, pushing his lead back to four shots and giving a big fist pump to show he knew how important it was to find the bottom of the club with that stroke.
Scheffler couldn’t answer with his putt, and now, he will have a significant deficit from which to battle back Sunday if he’s going to prevent MacIntyre from going wire-to-wire.
This week has been MacIntyre’s best performance of his PGA Tour career through three rounds, as his 194 strokes at the 54-hole mark is a career-low total, besting his 2024 Scottish Open championship performance by one. He’ll hope Sunday ends in a similar result but knows he will have to contend with one more round battling Scheffler and a crowd pulling for the world No. 1 to find the winner’s circle.
MacIntyre said he wasn’t surprised by the atmosphere, nor his ability to give it right back. His only request from the fans going forward is to follow long-held decorum and keep their participation between the shots.
“I totally expected to be in this situation today when I’m in this position,” he said. “It’s going to be the exact same [Sunday]. Yeah, I’ll give as good back as I get. … I mean, it started on the first tee. It probably started when I walked down to the range. It ain’t bothering me. It’s there. As long as they don’t do it within — if they do it outside the shot, it’s fair game, but don’t do it within the shot that’s going to affect myself or Scottie.”
The leader
1. Robert MacIntyre (-16): MacIntyre battled through the noise Saturday and will take a four-shot lead into the final round. He’s a fiery competitor and admitted after the round that the crowd getting on him only serves to give him a little more juice — something Scheffler noted tends to be the case after his round as well. At the same time, going up against someone as steady as Scheffler will be a test in patience for MacIntyre in the final round. Both MacIntyre and Scheffler noted that there are some aggressive pin positions at Caves Valley on steep slopes, and even quality shots often leave sweeping breaks and players will battle stressful par putts all day.
“The pins were absolutely brutal,” MacIntyre said. “You want to be underneath the holes, and where they cut the pins today, you just couldn’t get underneath them and you were standing there with 15 feet coming down a steep slope, a lot of time [with] a lot of break. Even the first hole, put a bunker shot to 15 feet and you’re left with 4 on AimPoint, which from 15 feet you’re aiming a good 3 feet outside the hole from 15 feet. So, there was massive slope.”
“They got it started today on 1,” Scheffler added of the tough pins. “That pin was pretty — on quite a bit of slope. I hit a pretty good shot in there and I got a 12-footer with a couple feet of break on it. I thought Bob made his putt on the first hole, and it was going sideways at the pin. It seemed like that pin was on 4 degrees of slope over there.”
They’ll likely deal with similarly challenging pins Sunday given the green complexes at Caves Valley, which will make for a fascinating final round for both players. MacIntyre handled that pressure extremely well in the third round, and his putt on the last to extend his lead back to four may prove extremely important as he’s got a healthy cushion as he pursues his third career win on the PGA Tour.
Contenders
2. Scottie Scheffler (-12)
3. Ludvig Åberg (-10)
It feels like it’ll be a two-man battle in that final pairing for the BMW Championship barring something spectacular from Åberg in the penultimate pairing. The Swede sputtered out of the gate Saturday but closed strong with three birdies on the back, including a long putt on the 18th, to give himself an outside chance. He’ll likely need a 64 or better Sunday to have a look at the win, but for a player who hasn’t been in contention as often as expected this year, he has to be pleased to see some return to form.
For Scheffler, he won’t change his approach going into the final round, even trailing by four. He wasn’t happy after his round with some of his ball-striking, as he leaked some irons and wedges off target and didn’t give himself as many looks at birdie as he hoped. But with the challenge of the pins at Caves Valley, he won’t take on any excessive risk, instead hoping his solid, steady approach wins out in the long run — as it so often does.
“It’s challenging,” Scheffler said about trying to make up ground on greens like at Caves Valley. “But that’s what I said about giving myself a good amount of opportunities today. I wasn’t as sharp as I would have hoped with the irons. I felt like I was putting kind of up and over hills a little bit today and felt like I could have put myself in better positions going into the greens.”
Scheffler will look to dial those in before he tees off alongside MacIntyre at 1:40 p.m. ET on Sunday.
Akshay Bhatia holes out — twice
One way to avoid the challenge of putting at Caves Valley is to just hit the ball in the hole with your irons, which Akshay Bhatia did twice Saturday. His first came on the 7th, pulling back a wedge on the short par-4 for an eagle. His second was even more impressive as he made a hole-in-one on the 227-yard par-3 17th, moving himself to 4 under on the day — all of which came on those two swings.
Not only was it Bhatia’s first hole-in-one on Tour — to win a BMW iX, to boot — but those two shots were enough to move him back inside the top 30 going into Sunday as he battles to make the Tour Championship. He’s back to even par for the tournament standing at T22 on the leaderboard and 28th in the projected FedEx Cup standings after starting the week 29th but slipping as far back as 32nd after a rough start.
2025 BMW Championship updated odds, picksRobert MacIntyre (10/19)Scottie Scheffler (7/4)Ludvig Åberg (20-1)
That putt on 18 pushed MacIntyre into being the strong favorite going into Sunday, and the way he’s playing — in particular, putting — it’s just really hard to see even Scheffler making up four shots on him on this course. It’s so hard to create great birdie looks consistently on these greens, and barring MacIntyre backing up, this ends with the Scot lifting the trophy on Sunday evening.