Fantasy Golf Sleeper Report – 2025 Arnold Palmer Invitational

2025 Arnold Palmer Invitational Fantasy Sleeper Report

A week after a 120/1 winner at the Mexico Open comes… another 120/1 winner!

In truth, you’d have gotten longer odds than that had you backed Joe Highsmith at the halfway stage of the Cognizant Classic. He only made the cut on the number, draining a five-foot putt to make the weekend, before laying waste to PGA National with rounds of 64 on Saturday and Sunday.

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Could we see a third consecutive first-time winner on the PGA TOUR this week? The answer, in truth, is probably not.

The Arnold Palmer Invitational is a Signature Event with stacks of top-20 players in town: Scheffler, McIlroy, Morikawa, Aberg, Thomas, Matsuyama amongst them, alongside Xander Schauffele, who makes his long awaited return from a rib injury.

This is as strong as PGA TOUR events get these days, and that will be matched by a Bay Hill course that has typically rewarded the best ball-strikers and tee-to-green merchants over the years.

The doglegging fairways feature thick tree lines and, typically, flanked with juicy rough, so there’s jeopardy off the tee and on approach too, with water in play on eleven holes and more than 80 bunkers.

The Bermuda greens are an average size but eminently miss-able when the Florida trade winds blow – as they just might over the weekend, so all told this is a fantastic test of all-round golf.

Of the last eight winners of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, five have won majors, two of the others are prolific winners, and the anomaly – Kurt Kitayama – ranked 16th and 10th on TOUR for SG: Off-the-Tee and Approach in 2024. He’s an elite ball-striker without the trophy cabinet to prove it.

The beauty of Signature Events is that we can back some classy operators at longer odds than normal, so in that spirit let’s take a look at our 2025 Arnold Palmer Invitational sleeper shortlist.

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Keegan Bradley – 55/1 – With a scoring average of 71.60 from more than a dozen visits to Bay Hill, this is a track that Keegan Bradley knows well and seemingly enjoys very much.

Getting full value for his ball striking, Bradley has finished second and third at Bay Hill, has posted two T10s and a T11, as well as a score of other handy finishes.

He seems to enjoy the challenge of traditional tree-lined golf, having performed admirably at Quail Hollow, Sawgrass, and the like, and despite being stepped upstairs as Ryder Cup captain, Bradley is still very much relevant as a player: he won the BMW Championship in August, and lost out in a playoff at the 2024 Sony Open, so he can still hang with the very best.

Daniel Berger – 55/1 – Things were going swimmingly for Daniel Berger at the Cognizant Classic, where he found himself T3 at the halfway stage and just two shots behind the leaders.

But then he complained of feeling unwell, his title bid fell apart, and he slipped down the leaderboard to T25.

Assuming that was only a temporary issue, Berger will continue his Florida Swing with plenty of confidence. He loves life in the Sunshine State and on Bermuda greens, and while he hasn’t been a regular visitor to Bay Hill, he does have a T13 on his ledger here.

The difference in 2025 is that he returns to the venue somewhere back to his best form.

Shane Lowry – 60/1 – The changes at PGA National perhaps don’t suit Shane Lowry, but he still came away from the Cognizant Classic with a T11 finish in a week in which he lost strokes to the field putting.

The switch to pure Bermuda will surely help a player that has set up home in Florida, particularly as his 2024 outing at Bay Hill was, comfortably, his best effort at the venue (T3).

The Irishman has that tee-to-green class that we look for at Bay Hill, and he heads to the track on the back of a run that has brought T11 at PGA National and solo second at Pebble Beach, where Rory McIlroy was the only player to shoot a lower number than Lowry.

Corey Conners – 66/1 – A player who, so far at least, hasn’t delivered the results his talent warrants, Corey Conners does clearly have a certain type of golf that he loves best.

Aside from his wins at the Texas Open, the Canadian’s best days on the PGA TOUR, in terms of ranking points, have come at Bay Hill (solo third in 2021), Augusta (T6 in 2022), and TPC Sawgrass (solo seventh in 2021). All of those venues correlate with each other nicely.

It would be fair to say that 2025 hasn’t quite gone according to plan for Conners, but one thing that hasn’t left him is his class off the tee – a foundation which can go a long way at Bay Hill. 

Curiously, he produced his best short game display in quite some time at the Genesis in his prior start, so it just feels as if he is trending in the right direction – that’s ahead of a return to a Bay Hill layout where he’s finished no lower than T21 in his last four visits.

Sahith Theegala – 90/1 – It’s remarkable to think that a player that was knocking on the door of the top ten in the world not so long ago is 90/1 this week.

It’s even more surprising when you consider the case for Sahith Theegala at Bay Hill, where he has improved from missing the cut in 2022 to finishing T14 and T6 since.

With top-ten finishes to his name at Augusta, Riviera Country Club, and TPC Sawgrass, there’s something about classical tree-lined golf that suits Theegala’s eye, and while his long game will need to improve to compete with the very best this week, sometimes the price dictates the bet: Theegala shouldn’t be 90/1 anywhere, let alone at a Bay Hill track he clearly enjoys.

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Want more of this week’s fantasy predictions? Check out our full fantasy preview for the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard here.

Fantasy Golf Predictions This Season (2024-2025)

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