Justin Thomas walked back onto a PGA Tour course for the first time in five months, and Bay Hill made him pay for every single shot. After two rounds of 79, Thomas finished dead last. The two-time PGA Championship winner looked like a man still finding his feet after back surgery, and he knew it.

“I’ve just felt like I was like humiliating myself out there. I’m, like, ‘This isn’t really that fun.’ So just really tried to use the [last] nine holes to be productive and get ready for next week. There’s no better place to try things, if you will, than competition. I had zero to lose.”

Rory McIlroy, Thomas’s Florida neighbor, had already raised an eyebrow when JT revealed the API would be his comeback event.

He said, “I saw J.T. a few weeks ago, and he said that this is going to be his first start…and I said, ‘Oof, that’s probably not the best place to come back to after six months off.'”

Now looking at the leaderboard, McIlroy wasn’t wrong. Bay Hill punishes hesitation and rewards precision, two things Thomas simply didn’t have across two days.

The numbers tell the full story. Round 1 set the tone immediately. Thomas went out in 38, already two over through nine holes, before the back nine completely unraveled. Double bogeys on holes 11 and 16 killed any momentum his back-to-back birdies on 14 and 15 had briefly offered. He came home in 41, finishing at 79. Round 2 was no different, another 79. Across 36 holes, he hit just 10 fairways and made only 110 feet of putts total. His previous worst score at Bay Hill’s Championship Course was a 76 in last year’s final round.

Justin Thomas’s last competitive round before this week was the Ryder Cup in September 2024. He then underwent microdiscectomy surgery on November 13, 2024, and walked straight into one of the Tour’s most demanding tracks carrying nearly five months of inactivity.

“It would have helped if I played remotely decent,” Thomas said. “I’m trying as hard as I can to give myself a little bit of grace of how long I haven’t played and how difficult this sport can be. But at the same time, I expect more out of myself. I don’t think there’s any situation where I feel like I should shoot 14 over par for two days.”

For a 16-time PGA Tour winner who has never claimed the title at Bay Hill, his best recent finish here was a T-12 in 2024, so the result was painful but not entirely surprising. The only real foundation to build on heading into next week: he came through 36 holes completely pain-free physically. Everything else gets rebuilt from there. And it must start with putting, which was the major issue that reflected in both rounds.

The greens exposed Justin Thomas the most

If there was one area that hurt Thomas most in Round 1, it was on the greens. He lost nearly four strokes putting, ranking 71st out of 72 players, while managing just 57 feet 8 inches of putts made across 18 holes.

JT admitted post-round that gauging speed was impossible. “I putted terrible today. I had a hard time gauging the speed.”

That struggle showed up directly in the numbers. He averaged 1.88 putts per green in regulation and hit only 8 of 18 greens, leaving himself almost no room to recover scoring-wise.

Round 2 brought no real relief either. His putting strokes gained dropped to -2.305, ranking 67th in the field. He made just 52 feet of putts, slightly worse than Round 1. Combined across both rounds, he lost 6.279 strokes on the greens alone, his single biggest area of damage.

Over 36 holes total, Thomas lost 13.833 strokes on the field across all categories, hitting just 35.71 percent of fairways and missing 20 of 36 greens in regulation. The putting will be the priority heading into next week, because everything else at least showed signs of life. Will it get better in the Players Championship, which is scheduled from March 13th to 17th? Or the American golfer has to face some more difficult situations like this. Well, only time will tell.