Farmers Insurance Open 2018: Tiger Woods’ tee time, plus full pairings for Friday

Tiger Woods made it through the opening round of the Farmers Insurance Open without much drama. It was a relatively uneventful tour through the South Course that ended with an even-par round of 72. He hit some poor shots, he hit a few good shots, and settled in the middle of the field, just on the wrong side of the cut line in a tie for 84th.

This fell in line with expectations. Torrey is the kind of place these days that doesn’t promote much exciting golf. There aren’t fantastic implosions, and there aren’t many wild birdie streaks or low-to-mid 60s rounds.

It’s just a tough course with narrow fairways and high rough set by the Pacific Ocean. And Tiger was coming off a year away from the Tour — there was never going to be some stripe show jumping right back into things. The goal was just to hang on, look healthy and stay pain-free, and avoid any complete disasters either chipping around the greens or with his driver.

Tiger will likely need a round under-par on Friday to make the cut. He’ll move over to the North Course, which has historically been the easier of the two venues. The South has teeth and is the U.S. Open track, while the North was always where you piled up birdies and made hay before the Friday night cut. But that disparity may be changing a bit since Tom Weiskopf redesigned the North a couple of years ago, making it a tougher test for the pros during this annual stop.

The North still played a few strokes easier than South last year during the redesign debut. But on Thursday, the gap narrowed:

It’s still a small sample size, but we know the greens on the North are still fairly rock hard, settling from the redesign. That may be what Tiger prefers as he tries to get in the red and make the cut at Torrey for the first time since 2014 when he made the Friday cut but missed a Saturday secondary cut.

It will start on the 10th tee at 12:30 p.m. ET, or 9:30 a.m. local in La Jolla. Woods is out again with Patrick Reed and Charley Hoffman. With two courses in play these first two days, it can send the entire 156-man field in a condensed two-hour block. So Tiger’s round will still fall within Golf Channel’s coverage window, which starts at 3 p.m. ET.

Expect to see his closing stretch of six to eight holes there, and you can watch it from the first tee on PGA Tour Live’s featured groups stream if you have a subscription there. (Here’s your viewing guide for the week.)

And here’s the full tee sheet for Friday’s second round in SoCal (all times ET):