Arnold Palmer Invitational: PGA Tour stars struggle early at Bay Hill

If you take a look at the Arnold Palmer Invitational leaderboard right now, you’ll see a surprising few numbers. Comparing last week’s Cognizant Classic (even just the opening round) with this week’s opener at Bay Hill paints a very different picture of golf.

Last week, someone almost tied the scoring record and ended up recording the 15th sub-60 score in PGA Tour history. The entire field was playing very well at PGA National. This week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, no one’s come close to that level of play.

Early Arnold Palmer Invitational leaderboard paints ugly picture

The Cognizant Classic made golf look like an easy sport. If Jake Knapp, who has one single PGA Tour victory to his name, can nearly tie an all-time record, then surely golf can’t be as hard as it seems. Turning on the Arnold Palmer Invitational this week will quickly put those thoughts to bed.

At the time of writing, the leader Cameron Davis was only three under. That would’ve been nine strokes off the lead last week at the Cognizant Classic. Davis and Keegan Bradley are tied through 15 holes. Mackenzie Hughes, Max Greyserman, Denny McCarthy, Si Woo Kim, Collin Morikawa, Corey Conners, Nick Dunlap, and Christian Bezuidenhout are the only players under par.

Notably, Ludvig Aberg, Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele (who is making his PGA Tour return from injury), Tommy Fleetwood, Viktor Hovland, Will Zalatoris, and Max Homa were all above par through about 1:30 pm EST.

The API does have a cut, unlike most other Signature Events. It’s one of three that do, including the Genesis Invitational and the Memorial Tournament. That means that some of these star golfers are going to have to quickly shed their rough starts to avoid going home early.

Of course, there’s still plenty of time for these guys to turn it around, but the course is playing particularly difficult today. Last week, the golf was a breeze for these guys. Even before that, it wasn’t this bad. Aldrich Potgieter was the runner-up two weeks ago at the Mexico Open, and he’s currently tied for 58th at the Arnold Palmer.

Bay Hill is not known as an easy course to play, but it’s so far showing that it has been the toughest for a lot of these golfers at least a few hours into the PGA Tour tournament. Maybe tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday will be a little better.