Story by Ken Duke | Photos by Tanner & Travis Lyons
If you’re a regular visitor to the NPFL site and a regular reader of “A Closer Look,” you know I can be extremely geeky and “Inside Baseball” in my approach to tournament coverage and analysis.
Since the dawn of “modern” bass tournaments in 1967, there simply hasn’t been a lot of meaningful metrics on tournament performance. Fans have had little to look at other than pounds and ounces or AOY points. Pundits often had little else to say other than “He’s really good with a spinnerbait!” or “Man, that guy can cast!”
It’s why I’ve worked to bring other, better metrics to our game. People talk about the “rich history” of our sport, but the other leagues seem to have little knowledge of theirs. Here at the NPFL, we’re still the new kid on the block. As a result, our history is not so long, but it’s also not lost. We know it, we’re keeping up with it, and we’re excited about sharing it with you.
A metric that I created years ago is one of those statistics that tells a story that should interest any hardcore bass fan. I call it Angler Against Average (or “AAA”), and it’s a single number that tells you how any angler performs under a variety of specifics.
Here’s how it works.
AAA is a scoring system whereby angler performance each day, each event, each season, or over the course of a career can be calculated. Just divide an angler’s catch weight by the average catch weight of that day, event, season, etc. A score of 1.0 is average. If an angler’s AAA score is 1.25, he is 25% better than average. If it’s 0.5, he’s performing 50% below average.
Over the course of a competition day or even a season, AAA may loosely follow the tournament or Angler of the Year standings, but it’s more nuanced and more precise than AOY points, which are linear (250 for first place, 249 for second place, etc.). Also, AAA allows for comparison across seasons or careers or even individual days on the water.
The points system for Progressive Angler of the Year has a lot to recommend it. It’s simple and straightforward. If you win a tournament, you get 250 points. Second place gets 249, and so on.
AAA is more complicated, but also very precise. If you win the tournament by a wide margin, it reflects that. You get more value than a single AOY point.
So that’s how it works, and here’s the list of the top anglers in the NPFL this season according to AAA, and their currently AOY ranking, just for purposes of comparison.
Angler AAA AOY ranking
Kyle Welcher 1.5449 1st
Drew Cook 1.5422 2nd
Zack Birge 1.4720 32nd
Trent Palmer 1.4671 5th
Isaac Peavyhouse 1.4632 4th
Hunter Sales 1.4621 3rd
Will Harkins 1.4498 7th
Jason Burroughs 1.4382 10th
Patrick Walters 1.4004 28th
Louis Fernandes 1.3975 6th
So, why are Birge and Walters so low in AOY standings and so high in AAA? In Birge’s case, it’s because he missed an entire tournament. That doesn’t hurt his AAA score at all, but it means he lost out on at least 130 AOY points — and lots more than that if he would have had a good finish.
As for Walters, it’s because he’s had a couple of ugly days at Saginaw Bay that really hurt his standing in AOY, but didn’t damage his AAA score very much since he had an outstanding third day.
If you like this kind of stuff, look forward to more of it and to applying it to things like the seasons, individual competition days (who’s best on Day 1, etc.), lake and reservoir types, and more. At the NPFL, “good enough” isn’t good enough. We strive for greater understanding, greater analysis, and greater coverage — in this and all other things.
We’re getting there.
The sport and the fans deserve it.
