Ryan Gerard’s Favorite Status at Cognizant Classic Reveals a Tour in Flux

After 35 years covering this game—and I mean really covering it, from the practice range to the locker room—I’ve learned that betting odds tell you something more than just who the smart money thinks will win. They tell you who the tour thinks is hot, who’s proven they belong, and maybe most importantly, who everybody suddenly expects to deliver.

Which is why Ryan Gerard sitting atop the Cognizant Classic board at +1600 this week at PGA National is far more interesting than your average weekly favorite.

Let me be clear: Gerard is a legitimate talent. The 26-year-old won the Barracuda Championship last July in his rookie season, and he’s already got three professional wins to his name. Those are real accomplishments, not the kind of thing you stumble into on a Tuesday afternoon. But there’s something about watching a young player go from 40-to-1 afterthought to lone favorite in the span of a few months that makes a veteran observer’s antenna go up.

"We saw a 26-year old born in the latter half of 1999 win last week at Riviera but I am not banking on yet another ‘Party like it’s 1999’ happening again for a second straight 26-year old this week in Palm Beach Gardens," Brady Kannon, the SportsLine handicapper, told me when I reached out before deadline. And you know what? He’s got a point.

When Momentum Becomes Pressure

In my experience, there’s a real difference between the heat you carry into a tournament and the weight you carry. Gerard’s hot—no question. Two straight runner-up finishes to start 2026 is the kind of form that gets the Tour talking. But then he tied for 28th at the Genesis Invitational last week, 12 strokes back. That’s not a disqualification; it’s context.

Here’s what strikes me: the oddsmakers have essentially anointed him as the guy to beat, which is a different thing entirely than being a talented young player in a strong field. When you’re 30-to-1, you can sneak up on people. When you’re the favorite, you’re expected to win. I’ve seen that transition turn promising careers into cautionary tales, at least for a tournament or two.

The Cognizant Classic has always been a middle-tier event on the tour calendar—not a major, not a Players Championship, but a solid $9.6 million purse and a respectable field competing on the par-71 Champion Course at PGA National. It’s the kind of week where a young player can either prove he’s arrived or learn a hard lesson about the gap between trending hot and actually winning when the pressure’s on.

The Field Tells the Story

What really interests me about this week’s setup is how the favorite line reveals the overall state of the tour’s depth. Shane Lowry at +1700? The Højgaard twins at +1900 and +2200? Michael Thorbjornsen at +2200? These are all legitimate players, but none of them are exactly household names outside the core golf community.

Compare that to a typical favorite field from, say, 2015 or 2016. You’d have established names, multiple major winners, guys with proven track records of closing out tournaments under pressure. Instead, we’ve got a bunch of hungry young talent and a smattering of veterans who are either rebuilding their brands or competing for mid-tier events because that’s where they fit.

"It is a very different world, going from 30-40-50-to-1 longshot to lone favorite and now being ‘expected’ to win the golf tournament," Kannon observed. He’s not wrong. That transition—from long shot to favorite—is precisely where the mental game separates the players who are going to have staying power from the ones who’ll be remembered as "that hot young kid for one season."

The Upside to This Story

But here’s where I want to balance the skepticism with some genuine optimism: this is actually a healthy development for the tour. Gerard winning a PGA Tour event as a 26-year-old rookie last season wasn’t some fluke. Neither are his runner-up finishes. Young players breaking through at this level and competing for titles is exactly what keeps the tour fresh and compelling.

The Cognizant Classic this week—played beginning Thursday at 6:45 a.m. ET from Palm Beach Gardens—gives Gerard a legitimate opportunity to prove Kannon wrong and validate the confidence the market has placed in him. That’s not a bad narrative. That’s sport.

What matters is whether Gerard can handle the expectation, whether he can stay composed when he’s the guy everyone’s watching, whether he can convert the form that got him here into actual results when it counts. That’s the test every young player eventually faces.

In three and a half decades around this game, I’ve seen plenty of players with his talent and his résumé. The ones who last are the ones who understand that one good year means you’ve got something special—but that three good years means you’ve got a career. Gerard’s still working on year two.