I made a lot of noise about BASS's new post-season in a previous opinion piece. I didn't like the fact that BASS created a designer, made-for-TV event to determine what's probably the most hallowed award in bass fishing.
Yes, the Classic title is monstrous, but among the pros and hardcore fans, the BASS Angler of the Year (AOY) title remains the most prestigious.
So where I sit now, after attending the Alabama River leg in Montgomery, is I still don't like it. It's purely for the sake of TV and the format and scoring is too kinky to stand up alongside 38 previous BASS AOY awards.
There have been 39 BASS AOY trophies awarded through history, including this one, but those trophies have gone to just 19 different anglers.
In comparison, the 39 Classic trophies through history have gone to 33 different anglers.
Same number of trophies but 19 different AOY winners, 33 different Classic winners.
That's because the Classic's a 3-day shootout. Luck factors into the Classic much more than AOY. No problem there – the Classic never aspired to be more than a championship.
Yet BASS's new Championship Week breaks the AOY endurance race into two 2-day legs, where the onerous and ugly "zero-weight" practice rears its head.
For some reason leagues seem to think that zeroing weight makes things more exciting. All it does is add luck to the equation. One big bite, or one missed big bite, amplify through the standings far beyond what they should.
The AOY award is about catching a quality limit of fish every single day on the water, week after week, across diverse venues and against full fields. It's a different kind of fishing than what championships, or Championship Week demanded. It's how Denny Brauer won his only BASS AOY title in 1987, and how Tim Horton did it in 2000.
Instead, Championship Week was a shootout. It put the pros on Jordan for 2 days, then zeroed the weight and moved them to the Alabama River.
BASS has always stood apart from the FLW Tour because it retained the cumulative-weight format for events and championships and kept a larger field fishing for more days. In fact, events where BASS instituted the zero-weight format and smaller fields (like the Megabucks, Elite 50s, Majors and Busch Shootout) have always withered and died.
Now all of a sudden the league's most prestigious title is decided by a zero-weight, small-field format? That's wrong.
Overall, Championship Week will make for good TV – a 3-hour special airs this Sunday at 4 p.m. ET on ESPN2. Beyond that I wasn't impressed.
The media attention and attendance that BASS wanted wasn't there. BassFan's traffic reports last week were well below the average for a regular-season Elite Series event, which probably shows the fans didn't take much interest. The first day of the Alabama River weigh-in looked somewhat like a ghost town. And the TV crews, personnel and media all seemed tired and ready to go home.
I'd always respected the Classic and AOY because they seemed to be "pure" titles, in the sense that they weren't manipulated to fit the small screen.
At least we've still got the Classic.
