While it’ll take something to knock Quail Hollow off the top spot in Rory McIlroy’s PGA Tour golf course success rankings, the four-time major winner clearly feels very much at home at Bay Hill.
While his win in 2018 – which came courtesy of a final-round 64 and one of the best putting weeks of his career – remains his only outright success in the Arnold Palmer Invitational, he’s only finished outside the top 25 once since 2015, and has racked up a runner-up, two further top fives, two top 10s, an 11th and a 13th.
Prior to that, it was a tournament he’d skipped, favouring the Honda Classic and the WGC at Doral for his Masters tune up, but is now making his 11th successive appearance and only Scottie Scheffler, with two wins, a fourth and a 15th in four starts can boast of better consistency at Arnold Palmer’s creation.
Despite not playing last week’s Cognizant Classic, the OWGR algorithm saw McIlroy overtake Xander Schauffele and move up to number two in the world, and it’s no surprise that the top two in the world are the top two in the pre-tournament betting.
Scheffler’s season has been a little stinted after being forced to the sidelines with a hand injury until the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and McIlroy, of course, stormed to victory on his PGA Tour season debut at the same event, but it would be a stretch to suggest that the latter has significantly narrowed the gap in terms of who is considered to be the best player in the world.
If he wins this week, however, at a golf course that’s been the Scottie Scheffler playground of late, then it’s a different story.
The reason for that is that Bay Hill is a golf course that plays into the strongest aspect of both players’ games. Off the tee, it’s far from easy, but on average, the fairways are wider at the 325-yard mark than they are at 275 and 300. This gives the big hitters an advantage, particularly when coupled with the firmer-than-normal greens that have become a trademark of this event in the past decade.
The par-3s all require mid- or long-irons, and the par-5s are all easily reachable with an iron from the fairway for the big hitters.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the winner will be among the top five or six in driving distance, it just gives them a strong starting hand, and the likes of Ludvig Åberg, fresh off his win at Torrey, will be another who’s licking his lips at the task ahead.
For McIlroy, Scheffler and assorted others, as much as a PGA Tour Signature Event and a $4 million first prize are alluring, the year’s first major is rapidly coming on the horizon and the laying down of a marker is gaining importance.
Last year, paired with Scheffler in the first two rounds at Augusta National, McIlroy seemed to know that Scheffler held the upper hand and that was largely because the world number one had wins at Bay Hill and TPC Sawgrass and a runner-up at the Houston Open in his previous three starts.
A second Signature Event success of 2025 would be far from a guarantee that Rory won’t falter under the pressure of yet another career grand slam bid, but rather than facing his biggest adversary with an inferiority complex, he’d be proving that – in recent weeks and months at least – his game is more than capable of matching up to and even surpassing Scheffler’s.
Of course it’s not a two-horse race at Bay Hill; it’s far from it, in fact. Just ask the machine-like Åberg, the recently overtaken Schauffele, the rejuvenated Justin Thomas, and the supreme iron player Collin Morikawa. But it is one of the little subplots leading in to the Masters.
And really, that’s what these weeks are for McIlroy. Majorless since 2014, but with 24 tournament wins across both the PGA and DP World Tours since, it’s increasingly all about nabbing that elusive fifth major and Green Jacket in particular.
But you get the sense that he’s ready, and this is another opportunity to prove it to himself and the other leading contenders.
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