Story by Ken Duke | Photos by Tanner & Travis Lyons
Few things get more attention in the bass world than big bass. Even in the tournament arena, big bass get big respect, and the anglers who consistently catch them are viewed differently.
What are they doing differently? What do they know that the other pros don’t know?
I put these “big bass specialists” into two categories: (1) the anglers who win the most tournament big bass honors and (2) the anglers whose average bass is larger than that of other anglers.
I’ll address the second group first. Show me the list of anglers whose average bass outweighs that of their competitors, and I will show you either (a) anglers who catch more bass than the rest (and are therefore culling more) or (b) anglers who do well early in the season—the pre-spawn—when bass tend to be heavier. The anglers in the (b) subset are doing well in early tournaments but struggling the rest of the year and not catching enough fish to hurt their average.
In 2025, 14 anglers had an average bass weight of three pounds or more. Here are the best 10:
# Angler Avg. Bass AOY
1. Skeeter Crosby 3.5677 lbs. 48th
2. Kyle Welcher 3.4640 2nd
3. Patrick Walters 3.4449 1st
4. Greg Hackney 3.3199 3rd
5. Scott Canterbury 3.3007 4th
6. Caleb Kuphall 3.1429 7th
7. Bill Lowen 3.1389 15th
8. Corey Casey 3.1070 18th
9. Brandon Cobb 3.0882 5th
10. K.J. Queen 3.0809 8th
All but one breezed into the 2026 NPFL Championship by virtue of their Progressive Angler of the Year ranking. The one who did not—Skeeter Crosby—did extremely well early on Santee Cooper but did not fare so well later. Crosby also had the lowest bassing average of the top 10.
The other nine benefited by limiting day after day. Seven of them limited every day of the entire season! When you go through that many fish and cull that often, you can dramatically increase the size of your average bass.
Who’s caught the most tournament big bass in NPFL history—the biggest bass of an entire event? It’s a tie between Jim Jones and Matt Massey. Each of them did it three times, but Jones did it three times in a row back in 2021, his only year in the League!
Massey has a deserved reputation as a big bass specialist. Not only has he claimed tournament big bass honors three times, but he leads the League in all-time daily big bass honors with four (tied with Brandon Perkins) and—amazingly—he finished fifth at Lake Murray in 2024 despite only bringing seven bass to the scales over two days. A couple more keepers would have meant a win for the affable Florida lunker hunter.
