Much of professional bass fishing has changed in 2019. FLW had their first FLW Tour event of the year on Sam Rayburn where Terry Bolton won his first Tour title in convincing fashion. MLF is hosting their inaugural Bass Pro Tour tournament this week on Lake Toho and then next week the FLW Tour will be on the same fishery to see what they can do. While BASS will be hosting its first Elite Series of the year down on the St. Johns River simultaneously as the FLW Tour.
The professional bass fishing tournaments seem more congested on the calendar now and tournament professional fields feel a little discombobulated as guys that have been on one tour or another have moved to somewhere else. Then bring in a crop of new talented anglers who found new opportunities with the introduction of a third tour and anglers moving around the sport to fish new trails.
BassRankings.com released an informational sheet in a recent article that outlines the experience levels now on the three professional bass fishing tours. They have had to adjust their independent ranking algorithms to accommodate not only three different professional fishing tours but an influx of new anglers and a radically different format in Major League Fishing’s Bass Pro Tour.
The article had me asking a lot of questions. How do you effectively compare guys fishing a six-day event to anglers fishing a four-day event? How do you weight the rankings according to strength of field with many unknowns and format changes? Is one field weighted heavier based on experience than another when the experience of that field came from the other tour’s events? It’s interesting to consider there are now more than 300-plus professional anglers competing on three tours and ranking them will be fairly complex.
I won’t get into to speculating on how their algorithms effectively accomplish all that, but I did find their infographic comparisons pretty interesting.