Tiger Woods is now the favorite to win at Bay Hill. Here’s why that makes sense.

In just the fifth PGA Tour start of his latest comeback, the one that hasn’t looked like a short-lived miserable slog, Tiger Woods is a heavy favorite to win the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

Golf odds can be a tricky thing to weigh, but we’re in an era when we spend more time talking about them than ever before. This is not a sport where the favorite usually wins. There are fields with 130 to 150 players with razor-thin margins between the worst-ranked player and the top-ranked player. It’s a game that’s notoriously fickle from week-to-week and relies on the right lucky bounce, often several of them, to actually win.

So saying Woods is the favorite does not mean he’s going to win this week for a ninth time at Bay Hill. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s got the best shot to win. But he’s got a good one and it makes sense for him to be the favorite, which is an astonishing thing to type in mid-March of the year 2018.

Woods’ odds are always out of whack because so much public money from fans wanting him to win comes flowing in on him relative to the other players. The people who take bets on these things have to limit their liability in case Woods does pull it off and win.

But there’s some merit now to these odds. In recent years, the odds were completely, unrealistically, absurdly out of whack at 30/1 and 40/1. Now he’s 6/1 to win a damn PGA Tour event. That’s a low number, for anyone, even those at the absolute peak of their game. When Woods was dominating, he’d get as low as 3/1 at some of these majors. While 6/1 is low, it doesn’t seem wrong that he’s the favorite. We’ll get into more on why but here are some of the other favorites for the 2018 API (odds via Jeff Sherman and GolfOdds.com)

Woods has owned Bay Hill. Sure, you could also say that in 2014, 2015, and 2016, when his game was a mess or he was incapable of swinging a golf club. It would still be true. But this year, we have reason to rely on and cite that past as a legit reason for future success.

Woods has eight wins in his career at Bay Hill. It’s a place, like Firestone and Doral and Torrey Pines, where he’s achieved what most pros can only dream about over their entire careers at all courses on the rota. Woods has done it at four or five courses. Bay Hill is one of them and it’s always been a friendly place for Woods. It was his first win to end a long drought following the 2009 sex scandal. It was where he won at the start of his last monster season on Tour in 2013.

Almost every iteration of Woods has won at Bay Hill over his career playing at the event. The different swings have won, the up-and-comer has won, the invincible player has won, and the player desperately looking for a win, any win, has won. Now comes the latest version, the fused-back miracle that’s hitting it as far as anyone on the PGA Tour and suddenly competitive again.

That distance and clubhead speed is fun and sexy to talk about, but his advantage this week lies, as it so often has, in his ballstriking with the irons. Here’s golf course architecture expert Andy Johnson of The Fried Egg on the features of Bay Hill

Usually, the leaderboard is littered with good iron players. Every par 3 is over 199 yards (#variety), and two of the par 5’s are reachable with irons. It makes sense that the greatest iron player of all time, Tiger, has dominated here.

This is, as you might guess, is an area of his game that has been the strongest in a remarkably rapid ascent back to competitiveness. We now have enough rounds for Woods’ season stats to be officially listed with the PGA Tour, and he’s currently 19th in strokes gained approach-the-green. His strokes gained around-the-green stats are also great, but it’s his ballstriking and irons that have improved in these last two starts in Florida. After his missed cut at Riviera, he said he was most frustrated with the fact he wasn’t hitting it “pin-high”, which he said had been the “hallmark of my career.” Some improved driving helped, but that ballstriking changed when he got to Florida. Now he’s had two late Sunday tee times and almost picked off a freaking win last week in Tampa (where strokes gained-approach was the strongest number in his game).

Bay Hill also ranked as the fifth-hardest course on the PGA Tour last year (non majors). Woods said last week at Valspar he was enjoying the layout, which he hadn’t played in more than 20 years, because it rewarded “par golf.” He said it was the style he prefers and he tends to be his most competitive at the tougher events, not the birdiefests that require you to shoot mid-60s all four days. The course, according to those on the ground, is in good shape. That’s not always been the case in recent years and the winning score has fluctuated. The average winning number over the last decade is between 11 and 12 under. That seems a likely number this week and one that Woods probably prefers.

There is also no clear-cut dominant player in the field this week. World No. 1 Dustin Johnson and No. 2 Justin Thomas are not playing. Rory McIlroy’s game has been off since he started his PGA Tour season a month ago. Jason Day and Justin Rose have looked strong over the last few months, but neither has been dominant in a way that would overcome the public money behind Woods.

So we’ve got a history of success, a setup he prefers, a course that suits his strengths, and most importantly, form coming into the event. This would have sounded insane just two months ago, but it makes sense for Woods to be the favorite this week.

This is the week when underdogs are supposed to have our hearts. March Madness is so popular because it’s where the favorites can improbably fall. Rooting for the favorites is a sign that you’re a bad person.

I saw some blowback to the coverage and conversation of Woods last week in Tampa. There were critiques that the excitement around Woods playing well and contending became too much and crossed some sort of imaginary line.

That is nonsense. Why wouldn’t you lose it a little bit for one of the greatest athletes of all time making an unlikely comeback? We lose it when Aaron Rodgers goes off or Aaron Judge hits one 500 feet. Russell Westbrook won a damn NBA MVP, in at least some small part, due to NBA Twitter and the NBA internet losing its shit every other night when he did something outrageous.

The point is it’s good to marvel at these things from the best in the game. It’s fine to want it and root for it. Maybe you’ve been a Woods hater over the course of his career — he’s been a jerk or just not fun to root for or somehow offended your very important personal creed of “what the game should be.” Even that kind of person should be wise enough to cast aside that history and see that this is a new type of story that you should embrace. It’s sports and if you’re concerned that there’s too much Woods fanboyism, then you’re probably not a very fun person to be around.

Had Woods won the Valspar Championship, it would have been one of the greatest sports stories of all time. It will be if/when he wins again. Getting excited about that or even rooting for that doesn’t make you some sort of fanboy. It also doesn’t mean you’re rooting for others in the field to fail. It doesn’t mean you’ve always loved Tiger Woods, or even love him now. It means you’re a well-adjusted human with a pulse.