The overrated Bear Trap, Brooks' Florida Return and Lowry's Curse: 10 things for the Cognizant Classic

Golfpocalypse is a meandering collection of words that runs prior to each week's PGA Tour event. Reach out with your hottest takes on absolutely anything at shane.spr8@gmail.com. We'll publish the best emails here.

1. Rogue Golf Thought: I invented a stupid and easy pool for Friday mornings

Inventing stupid sports pools is one of my favorite pastimes, and I came up with this one expressly to give myself and my friends something golf-related to talk about on Friday mornings—arguably the deadest time of a tourney week—while we're killing the hours until the weekend. Each Thursday night, everyone in the pool gets assigned a player in the morning wave of golfers teeing off on Friday in the PGA Tour event (or major). The draw is totally random, and whatever that player shoots on Friday morning, that's your number for the week. We're running it for 10 weeks, lowest score to par wins.

Because this is just a blind draw that takes absolutely no skill, the entry fee is just $1. However, I fully expect us to treat it like life or death for four hours each Friday morning, which is the whole point. Also, I encourage all the degenerates among you to copy this and charge a $1,000 entry fee, with last place having to join the Taliban, or whatever it is you people do now.

2. Yes, we're in the schedule doldrums, but sometimes the doldrums can surprise you

There's no use beating around the bush here: The Cognizant Classic is a bit of a rough scene in 2026. I remember covering this when it was called the Honda Classic in 2022, and it truly felt like the sloggiest week of my golf-covering career. Just a total slog, almost no stars, and in a particularly soulless part of our union's most soulless state. It hasn't improved since. This year, the highest ranked player by OWGR is Ryan Gerard at No. 26, which is dismal, and it's no surprise—this comes right after not one, but two West Coast signature events and right before Bay Hill (another signature event) and the Players (a major another signature event). It's the most obvious "skip" week on the calendar, and it's part of the reason why Rolapp is talking about a tighter schedule where everyone has to show up to everything.

HOWEVER … once in a while, tournaments like these can deliver some unexpected electricity. I'm not saying it's going to rock your world, but take a look at the 2025 schedule and you'll see find some very cool moments on Sundays at some real second-tier events. Viktor Hovland coming out of nowhere at the Valspar, Brian Campbell finally getting his win in Mexico, Cam Young destroying souls at the Wyndham, things of that nature. Look at the field this week, and you've still got the likes of Shane Lowry, Michael Thorbjornsen, the Hojgaards, Billy Horschel, Joel Dahmen and Max Homa lurking. Hell, even Tom Kim is there. I'm not saying I'm going to injure myself running to the TV Thursday or Friday, but there are still some terrific stories hiding in the shadows.

And that's the calculation you need to think about when it comes to the hypothetical 20-event schedule. You'd get stacked fields, yes, but is it worth losing golf every weekend, and losing those Sunday surprises? My take, which may change, is no.

3. Oh yeah, BROOKS is here too

I purposefully didn't mention him above, but one great thing about reinstating a superstar like Koepka via the pathway Rolapp invented is that at least for a little while, he's going to show up at these events. He can't play the signatures for now, so he's got to take advantage of the Cognizants and Valspars of the world. Which is phenomenal. They should boot one all-time juggernaut every year just so we have a rotating cast of very compelling names playing our least compelling tournaments. Koepka was actually a semi-regular here before he left for LIV, and was even there in 2022 when I last covered it, where he delivered this line about the fledgling Saudi league potentially being KO'ed by Mickelson's "scary **************s" line:

"I don't see it backing down; they can just double up and they'll figure it out. They'll get their guys. Somebody will sell out and go to it."

SPOILER: IT WAS HIM! HE WAS TALKING ABOUT HIMSELF!

Seriously, though, Koepka pulled off a T-2 here once, so there's nothing saying he can't post a result. He's easily the most exciting man in the field.

4. Is Shane Lowry Cogni-Cursed?

Going back to that same year, 2022, Lowry was right in the mix at the end and felt he got screwed by some untimely rain. "That bad weather came in just as we were hitting our tee shot on 18, which was as bad a break as I've got in a while," he said, and you could see him fuming. In fact, his solo second to Sepp Straka that year was his best finish at the event, but he followed it with two straight top-fives, and last year he was T-11. He is obviously very good at PGA National, he lives nearby, and he's second-favorite behind Gerard to win this week. But is he cursed?

No, probably not. But we can safely say that if he comes close and doesn't win again, he'll probably be mad at something. This is the guy who set the world record last year by saying some variation of "f*** this place" at three of the four majors, including Portrush, where they made a mural of him (at Augusta, he simply got mad at having to answer questions about Rory). Then he went and sank the Ryder Cup-winning putt.

Wait a minute ... has Lowry sneakily become the game's biggest drama king??

5. The Bear Trap might be completely overrated

The PGA Tour keeps this nifty stats page where you can see the hardest holes of the year ranked from 1 to 882, and when it comes to the Champion Course at PGA National, you have a few selections in the top 300 from 2025:

No. 6 (52nd hardest overall)
No. 15 (163rd overall)
No. 14 (190th overall)
No. 2 (229th overall)
No. 7 (234th overall)
No. 16 (261st overall)
No. 5 (297th overall)

Now, the so-called "Bear Trap" consists of Nos. 15, 16 and 17, a pair of par 3s sandwiching a par 4. I guess you can consider No. 15 decently hard, at +.149 strokes over par, but 163rd is not a very impressive ranking, and it gets worse from there, with No. 16 less than a stroke under par (+.083) and No. 17 actually playing under par (-.031). Add them all together, and you've got an average of +.201 strokes over par in the 2025 event. If that were one hole, it would fall around 106th in the 2025 rankings. That's not that hard!

Now, to the Trap's credit, No. 16 got way harder on Sunday, jumping up to the 72nd fourth-round hole. Still, to deserve the name, I need more teeth, more carnage. Until they get at least one of those holes in the top ten, I'm calling it the Teddy Bear Trap. (They may never recover from that burn.)

6. Ranking the Sponsor's Exemptions

Best: Blades Brown. Folks, we love an 18-year-old prodigy. And he already finished T-18 at the Amex!
Fun: Harry Higgs - It's easy to take your shirt off in Phoenix, Harry. If you're a real man, do it at the Bear Trap.
Class: Camillo Villegas. The story of his family as seen on Full Swing is still so incredibly sad and moving. Also, it's a boom time for old-guy sponsor's exemptions, as Adam Scott proved last week.
Ehhhh: Adam Hadwin - I like the guy, I like his wife, but it feels like his story is kind of over? The only way for him change my mind is getting trucked by another security guard.

7. Cognizant should put a car back on the water

Look, I understand Cognizant is not a car company—Google's AI says they provide "IT consulting, outsourcing and digital transformation services"—but I miss when Honda would put a car on the water by the 18th hole. It looked cool, it had a certain biblical aura (how does it drive on water???) and you could always entertain the faint hope that somebody would hit and shatter a window. And did you know they had a local badass sort of swim it out there, risking death by alligator? This tournament needs a compelling image like that. Maybe Cognizant could stick an IT consultant out there and not feed him for four days? Maybe let people hit balls at him in between groups? I mean, they gotta do something.

8. The Golf Tweet of the Week

Brendan wasn't the only one to tweet out this idea, which is self-evidently true and needs no more discussion, but I'm giving him the nod for the use of "preposterous," a great word that needs to be used more in sports discourse, and not just by Stephen A. Smith.

9. One Normie Pick, One Weird Pick

I'll go with Lowry as the normie pick, he's bound to break through here eventually (maybe they'll keep weakening the field until he's playing against children in 2032). For my weird pick, I'm going to lean on the fact that PGA National hasn't really favored bombers the last four years, add in a dollop of experience and pick Daniel Berger. He's only missed one of these events in the last ten years, and he's been semi-solid this year despite a missed cut last week. Andddd the more I'm talking, the more I'm realizing this isn't that weird a pick. If you need something weirder, take Dan Brown. (Not the golfer, the author of The Da Vinci Code.)

10. The Rogue Non-Golf Thought: Don't back into parking spots

I understand why you're doing it. I understand that you want an easy pull-out when you leave. But here's the thing: Reversing out of a parking spot is part of life. You just have to deal with it. When you back in to a parking spot, though? It completely jams up the flow of traffic, sows confusion (are you passing the parking spot up, or just pulling ahead to initiate the back-in?) and makes everyone hate you. It's fundamentally a selfish act, and a massive black mark on your character. Act like a normal person, and scour the parking lot for the rare but glorious two-spot pull-through.