Tiger Woods draws highest odds of career to win Farmers Insurance Open

Whenever there have been questions or doubts about the form of Tiger Woods’ golf game, a visit to Torrey Pines usually makes things right. This year, however, Tiger arrives at Torrey and the Farmers Insurance Open off his worst round ever and with the highest odds to win in his pro career.

Tiger’s game is a mess right now but that’s never really deterred the oddsmakers in the past. He’s almost always the favorite in every event that he enters, with the assumption that he’ll draw huge sums of public money. But Jeff Sherman, a Las Vegas bookie and the man who maintains the GolfOdds Twitter account, relayed on Monday that Woods is a 50/1 longshot to win this year’s Farmers Insurance Open.

Of all the surprising things we’ve seen from Tiger in the past couple months, and especially the past week, this may be the most startling indicator of how far he’s fallen. There was the career-worst round, the dead-last finish on a relatively easy course, and the crippling fear of hitting basic chip shots. But the fact that leading oddsmakers are now setting lines like this is astounding.

This week’s layout is a course that Tiger owns, with seven titles in this tournament and a major win when the 2008 U.S. Open was held here. He won here just two years ago, the beginning of a five-win season that had him installed as the usual 4- or 5-to-1 favorite every time he teed it up.

Regardless of the state of his game, you always expected Tiger to show up at places like Torrey Pines, Bay Hill, Doral, and Firestone and be installed as the automatic favorite. Now we’re wondering if he can even make the cut, and oddsmakers are begging the public to get behind him with the longest odds of his career.