The second round of The Northern Trust on Friday was one of the wildest first two days of an event the PGA Tour has seen in a long time. Scottie Scheffler shot 59. Dustin Johnson parried his last seven holes to shoot 60 (!). And several massive names barely cut within the cut line to play this weekend at TPC Boston.
We will see all of this and more as we look back on the final second round of the season for a great group from this field. Let’s start at the top with the leaders.
1. Dustin Johnson (-15) – There are so many preposterous numbers from Johnson’s second round 60, I’m not sure which one stands out the most. But we’ll go with this: Johnson got eight strokes on the front nine of the course. None other than Scheffler suffered more than 6 strokes all day.
T2. Scottie Scheffler, Cameron Davis (-13) – Sometimes 59 do not rise as the round of the year when you look more closely at the numbers reached. In this case, it probably will. Scheffler won 10.5 strokes on one of the best fields of the year with everyone included and no pretenders among the 125 competitors. When you get into the double digits, you’re in really rare air, which is what it felt like watching Scheffler’s 59 go down in Round 2.
T4. Danny Lee, Harris English, Louis Oosthuizen (-12) – English must ask what he should do after he shot a 64 with two bogeys on Thursday and on Friday 65 and a clean card 66 and yet DJ chases after three who go into the weekend. The driver was a little touching Friday, but his putter made up for it. That will not be a sustainable formula for him for the next two days, but he is one of the few on this board who can actually take part in a ball-striking game with Scheffler and Johnson, and live to tell about it.
T7. Kevin Kisner, Russell Henley (-11) – Henley was able to play his way into next week’s BMW Championship. He came in 101st in the FedEx Cup standings, but is currently in the top 70 based on his T7 position. He’s going to have to maintain that all weekend, but with the way he’s hitting it right now (4th in strokes won from tea to green), that’s definitely in play.
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T9. Si Woo Kim, Matthew Wolff, Daniel Berger (-10) – Wolff has been one of the hottest golfers in the world for a month now. He’s third from tee to green so far behind DJ and Scheffler, and if he’s fully placed (which, if the PGA Championship was the only indication, he might not be!) He will be in the mix on Sunday afternoon. Kim and Berger have also had hot hymns for several weeks now.
T20. Justin Thomas (-7) – Even though he’s eight under, Thomas has to look at those 59 by Scheffler and 60 by DJ and wonder how he can take the course separately on Saturday and Sunday. The last player to win on this course has a tendency to go out early this weekend and roll up the Leaderboard, and I would expect some early fireworks from him in Round 3.
T40. Rickie Fowler (-5) – Fowler came 88th in the FedEx Cup this week, and although he made the cut, he has somehow dropped to 95th. However, he lives in this tournament, which is what counts. He will probably need a monstrous weekend and a top-10 finish to play his next week though. With the way he beats it so far this week (negative streaks won ball-strikingly), I’m not sure that will happen.
T58. Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods (-3) – McIlroy and Woods were both frustrated on Friday on a day when (clearly) something was at stake in the low 60s. Tiger limped home with a 1-over finish in his last three holes that barely got him through the weekend. McIlroy eventually missed a 5-foot bird pit that did not turn out to be expensive, but was emblematic of his day. Big Cat was especially bad on Friday, as he almost finished the last in the field winning in strips around the green and not hitting the ball at all (he actually did that until the start). He may have given the quote of the day in his post-round media scrum on his bad play, and now he will have a weekend to try and claw his way back into the conversation. Every conversation about profit no. 83 was absent on Friday when DJ got him through 11.
MC. Jordan Spieth, Tony Finau, Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Collin Morikawa – For Spieth and Mickelson, their seasons are over. Lefty will follow the PGA Tour Champions next week, but we will not see Spieth again until September and the new season. Thus ends a long, arduous year for the former FedEx Cup champion and three-time big winner. He’s going to be in the lab for the next few weeks with the US Open and Masters coming up, but there’s (unfortunately) no end in sight to his on-course battle.
CBS Sports was with you the whole way in updating this story with the latest scores, updates and highlights below. Check out the live scores at the top of this story, a more detailed Leaderboard and our full view of the show.
