Though Tiger made no excuses in his remarks to the media after losing to Tim Clark yesterday, Mark Canizzaro of the New Your Post figured he would make excuses on Woods' behalf.

[T]he hype that surrounded his return and his tidy, stress-free 3-and-2 win over Brendan Jones in Wednesday's opening match had many of us salivating to see Woods return to doing remarkable things on the golf course.

But when you step back, take a breath and try to make sense of it all, Woods losing, well, makes some sense.

Bottom line is, he was coming off a long layoff from competitive golf and, regardless of Woods' comments about expecting to win this week, this tournament was going to be a litmus test of sorts for him.

Perhaps the worst thing to come out of it, other than not winning, is the fact that Woods didn't get a lot of golf in - playing just one practice round before playing his 32 holes (16 against Jones Wednesday and 16 against Clark).

Another thing to consider as we try to make sense of Woods' early departure back to Florida, where he will hang at home before playing the CA Championship at Doral in two weeks, is the fact that match play is a quirky format.

Though it doesn't look good that he lost in the second round, Woods didn't play poor golf yesterday. Clark, en route to only his third-match play win ever, simply played a lot better.

So, Tiger said losing was possible.  He's been saying that for years.  And you still thought he would win?

Mark gives Tim Clark some credit, sure.  The overtone of the whole piece, though, seems to be that we shouldn't have had such high expectations for Tiger.  This is the mindset that inspired last night's post.