The Memorial Tournament presented by Workday is underway at Muirfield Village Golf Club, and Patrick Cantlay is back in the field with a familiar kind of appeal. He has won the event multiple times, and oddsmakers have him at +3600 to win it again.
That number is getting attention because Muirfield Village keeps asking the same questions every year. The par-70, 7,569-yard layout in Dublin, Ohio, demands accuracy off the tee, elite iron play and a short game that can recover when the course gets teeth. The rough is around 4 inches, the greens are about 5,000 square feet, and that combination is why the Memorial Tournament is treated as one of the sharper tests on the schedule.
Cantlay has at least shown enough recent form to stay in the conversation. He finished T32 at THE PLAYERS Championship, T35 at the PGA Championship, and also put together stronger stretches with a T7 at the Valspar Championship, a T12 at the Masters, a T8 at RBC Heritage and a T10 at the Truist Championship. Those results explain why he is still being framed as a live option even as his win equity has dipped since 2023.
That drop matters because this field is not built for sentiment. Scottie Scheffler arrives as the defending champion after successfully defending his title last year, and he did it by ranking first in approach in 2024 and second in the field on approach when he won last season. On a course where approach play can decide the week, that is the sort of benchmark Cantlay has to match rather than simply admire.
The friction for Cantlay is obvious: the course history is real, but the price is longer than the profile of a repeat favorite. Still, Muirfield Village tends to reward the same traits every year, and those are the ones that have kept Cantlay in the conversation. If he is going to turn a strong past into another Memorial Tournament title, he will have to do it the hard way, against a setup that punishes anything less than sharp ball-striking from the first round through the final putt.
