Séamus Power needed to play his final three holes in two-under-par to climb above the cutline at the PGA Tour’s Bank of Utah Championship at Black Desert Resort, and that’s exactly what he did.
Ranked 104th in the FedEx Fall Rankings, with only the top 100 retaining their full PGA Tour playing privileges for 2027, each point could prove crucial and after a top-10 finish at the Biltmore Championship in his last start, the Waterford man has given himself every chance of regaining full status for next season.
But after an opening one-under 70, he needed to improve considerably to make it to the weekend in Utah. A birdie on his first – the 10th – was the ideal start, and he kept his hot streak going to reel off four-in-a-row from the third to get to five-under through six.
But poor approach shots to the par-4 seventh and par-3 eighth resulted in back-to-back bogeys and when he dropped another shot on the second, his chances of making the cut were slipping away fast.
A birdie on the par-4 fourth gave him renewed hope, and after another on the par-5 16th, he made his way to the final tee knowing that anything less than birdie and he was going home.
A good drive left him 250 yards into the par-5 ninth green, but he leaked his approach a little right and found the greenside bunker before splashing out to 12-and-a-half feet. His putter has been his most reliable weapon all season, and it proved its worth again as he found the bottom of the cup to get to -6 and make the cut on the number.
Though he’s 11 shots off the lead, he now has two more rounds to gradually claw his way up the leaderboard.
Austin Smotherman made 10 birdies to match the lowest round of his PGA Tour career, a nine-under 62, that gave him a one-shot lead at the top.
Smotherman, playing in his 100th PGA Tour event and still looking for his first victory, made all but two of his 10 birdies from inside 10 feet. His longest was a 20-footer on the par-3 17th, part of a birdie-birdie-birdie finish that gave him his second 36-hole lead of the year at 17-under.
Kevin Roy opened with a pair of 63s and broke his best 36-hole score by five shots, but that still only got him within one of Smotherman at the halfway mark. In perfect conditions at the Black Desert Resort, that left him one shot behind Smotherman.
The late drama came from Jackson Koivun, the 21-year-old who finished at Auburn in June and was unbeaten in the Presidents Cup last week at Medinah. Koivun was outside the projected cut line for much of the afternoon and, like Power just before him, came to the par-5 18th needing birdie to assure playing the weekend.
His drive found the bunker down the left side, and his ball was slightly sitting down because of the rake grooves. He still went with a 5-wood with lava rock looming left of the green. He cleared that and stayed short of more trouble, then hit a pitch-and-run and converted a birdie putt from six feet for a 67.
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