Story by Ken Duke | Photos by Tanner & Travis Lyons
Have I got a stat for you!
This one may or may not surprise you, If you’re a regular reader of my articles on the numbers that infuse professional tournament bass fishing, this one won’t shock you … but I hope it will inform you.
One thing I like to point out about our sport is that there’s more stability in it than most fans realize. It’s not often that the leaderboard gets shaken up from one day to the next. Far more often the changes and shifts are subtle, almost imperceptible.
We’ve reached a point in the season—five events into a six-tournament season—when I like to go back and look at the way we started, back to the first event of the season on the Santee Cooper lakes in South Carolina.
That was a great tournament! There were lots of big bass caught and lots of records set. For those reasons, it might have seemed like an outlier—something very different from the rest of the events we’ve had this year when the bass were much smaller but far more plentiful.
But it was not an outlier. In high-level tournament bass fishing, the cream rises to the top fast … even under conditions that differ from the rest of the schedule.
Twenty-six of the top 40 anglers from Santee are still in the top 40 of the Progressive Angler of the Year standings with one event to go. That’s 65%. Ten of the top 20 from Santee are still in the top 20 of the AOY standings.
Of the top 40 anglers in the AOY race, all but one of them finished in the top 68 at Santee. There were 118 anglers in that tournament, and that’s a statement about how important it is to get off to a strong start.
Are these numbers unusual? Are the top anglers usually spread out more in the first event of the season. No. Not at all. These numbers are normal. The best anglers get off to solid starts and stay on or around the top all … year … long. Ours is not a sport of big comebacks. They happen, but so rarely that they’re big news, causing many to think big comebacks are common.
To narrow the scope a little, you should know that the anglers who had a good Day 1 are the ones most likely to excel on Day 2 and again on Day 3. And the angler most likely to win an event is the leader going into the final round. In fact, in NPFL history, 60% of the Day 2 leaders went on to win!
It means that if someone offered you a bet—you could have the Day 2 leader or the rest of the field (more than 100 other anglers), the smart money would take the leader and not the field.
Anyone outside the top three or four going into the final round is a long, long, longshot. Don’t bet on those guys, no matter how good you think they are.
The same principle holds true with regard to the AOY standings. The anglers who did well in the first tournament are the ones most likely to do well in subsequent events. Are there exceptions? Of course? In every tournament there are excellent anglers who bomb and lesser anglers who excel. Overall, though, it levels out, and the cream rises to the top.
And if we follow the sport, we typically know who the most talented anglers are and identify a “fluke” bad performance. When John Cox finished 63rd in the season debut at Santee, was that an accurate reflection of his expected performance level? Of course not. That’s why he’s now 11th in the AOY standings. Since stumbling at Santee, he’s posted four straight top 24 finishes, and if he had been 33rd at Santee instead of 63rd, he’d be fourth in AOY. One slip can be costly!
Ultimately, I’m a big believer in a quote I heard many years ago from NFL coach Bill Parcells. He was talking about football teams, but it’s true of anyone or anything with a measurable performance standard. Parcells said, “You are what your record says you are.”
And the best anglers in the NPFL—or any other tournament circuit—can usually be identified right out of the gate.
