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Two years ago Skeet Reese won that AOY title. Last year he led the points race after eight regular season events but ultimately fell to Kevin VanDam in the two-event post-season showdown. He’s rocketed out of the gate this year with 2nd, 5th and 1st place finishes and while the season is not yet half over and it’s too early to make meaningful predictions, his early season domination raises the question of whether he can put together the best Elite Series season any angler has achieved to date.
He certainly hasn’t come out of nowhere. His worst ranking in a completed Elite Series AOY race was 7th in 2006. He’s earned checks in the last 13 regular season Elite Series tournaments he’s fished, spanning three separate seasons, missing most recently at Erie in August of 2008. Before that, the last time he’d missed the money was in June of 2007 at Grand Lake.
Given his track record and his blazing hot start, it’s hard not to wonder: Might this be the start of the best single season in the four plus years of Elite Series competition?
Even when all of the evidence is available, it’ll still probably be a hard call to make. Do you judge the best season by average finish? By the percentage of the field that an angler beat on average? By the amount of money made per event? To what extent should wins be weighted? No two fans of fishing will likely agree on exactly which criteria should be used, but the analysis below is meant to provide some food for thought.
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Reduced-field or standalone events (e.g., the Classic, the post-season title chase and the now-defunct Majors) have different dynamics than regular season events – not only are the tournaments formatted differently, but by their very nature they encourage anglers to take unusual risks which may result in a skewing of their normal finishes. Accordingly, we will leave those events out of our number crunching.
For the sake of argument, the seasons against which we’ll compare Skeet’s current campaign are all of the Elite Series AOY efforts (Ike in 2006, Skeet in 2007, KVD in 2008 and KVD in 2009). Since Skeet actually led the race after the eight regular season events last year, it seems obvious that his 2009 season should be included as well. Furthermore, but for a DQ at Santee-Cooper KVD might have claimed an additional AOY title in 2006. Without excusing his apparently inadvertent miscue, for comparison’s sake it makes sense to add in his 2006 record as well, both with and without the DQ. |
Here are their regular season finishes:
Skeet 2010: 2nd, 5th, 1st
Skeet 2009: 22nd, 6th, 24th, 9th, 2nd, 4th, 29th, 14th
Kevin 2009: 8th, 2nd, 45th, 1st, 20th, 2nd, 28th, 27th
Kevin 2008: 31st, 1st, 45th, 56th, 4th, 8th, 2nd, 1st, 32nd, 18th, 28th
Skeet 2007: 9th, 4th, 2nd, 6th, 53rd, 4th, 67th, 2nd, 13th, 1st, 14th
Ike 2006: 16th, 13th, 18th, 1st, 12th, 10th, 39th, 6th, 66th, 4th, 41st
Kevin 2006: 6th, 3rd, 103rd (Santee DQ), 4th, 50th, 22nd, 3rd, 3rd, 9th, 30th, 13th.
One major difference among some of the campaigns is the change from an 11-event regular season to a truncated 8-event schedule. This has the potential to cut both ways. An angler who gets hot or for whom the bite sets up well (think sight-fishing or post-spawn cranking, depending on the year) can ride that to success. On the other hand, the effects of a single bad finish are magnified.
Mercurial Beginnings
No angler in our group has started hotter than Skeet in an Elite Series season. In 2007, then-rookie Derek Remitz started off the year with a win at Amistad and followed it up with a runner-up finish at the California Delta. A 75th place finish at Clear Lake prevented him from matching what Skeet has done thus far this year, but he rebounded at the fourth tournament to finish 5th – so his average through four events was between 20th and 21st.
VanDam had a slightly better average through four events last year, adding a 45th to three top eights to average 14th.
Even better was Skeet’s 2007 where he notched four straight top twelves to start the season before missing a check in the fifth event. His four-event average was slightly worse than 5th place.
Ike’s 2006 season demonstrated even more consistency over time. He finished no worse than 18th in the first six events, for an average finish of better than 12th place. Through eight events, he was still averaging better than a 15th place finish before 66th and 41st place finishes in two of the last three events dropped that average.
Season-Long Averages
While it’s unlikely that Skeet will maintain his better-than-3rd place finish all season, his average finish may better the historical bests, which generally fall between 15th and 20th place.
Among the seasons under examination, Ike’s 20.55 and KVD’s 21.45 were the lows for Anglers of the Year. KVD had an average of 22.36 in 2006, but if you remove the 103rd place finish for his DQ at Santee, his average for the other 10 events is 14.30.
Skeet’s 15.91 (2007) and 15.00 (2009) were slightly better than KVD’s 16.67 in 2009.
Average finishes need to be taken with a grain of salt because the size of the Elite Series field has varied from year to year and even within a given season. There were 106 anglers at the start of 2006, 108 to start 2007, 109 at the commencement of 2008, 100 to start last year and 93 when the tour kicked off in California this year.
While it doesn’t move the figures much, adjusting for field size means that Skeet’s 2009 season, in which he averaged a finish in the top 15 percent might have actually been less impressive than his 2007 season, in which his average finish was in the top 14.73 percent, with three additional events.
Is Winning Everything?
Among the seasons under consideration, only Skeet’s 2009 season and KVD’s 2006 season do not include a regular season win. Under the weighted points system utilized by BASS, a win is exceptionally valuable in the points race and the $100,000 top prize contributes disproportionately to the wallet.
This raises the question of whether a season can be considered superlative without a victory. Skeet was probably somewhat assuaged last year by the fact that he won the Classic while the calendar indicated 2009, but as far as regular seasons go, the lack of a win might make it outstanding but not the best ever. The only season on our list which includes two Elite Series regular season victories was KVD’s 2008 effort.
Top Twelves and Checks
If wins are an indicator of an exceptional season but not necessarily a determinative factor, what do checks and top twelve finishes mean? In other words, to what extent should consistency and the ability to avoid bombs matter? How do we weigh the home run hitter who strikes out more than the contact hitter?
Right now, Skeet is batting a thousand in the check department and a thousand in top twelves, too, but that’s only through three events.
In 2007, he won a tournament, earned 9 checks in 11 events (82 percent) and was inside the top twelve 7 times (64 percent), along with 13th and 14th place near misses. After that, the best percentage of top twelves was KVD’s 6 out of 11 (55 percent) in 2006. The worst percentage was notched by KVD in 2009 and Ike in 2006 at 45%. Realistically, however, there is only a small difference between 55% and 45% -- it means making 5 out of 11 cuts instead of 6.
In terms of check-cashing consistency, both Skeet and KVD were 8 for 8 last year. The worst percentage among the seasons under consideration was Skeet’s 9 for 11 in 2007, but as noted above that was also the year that he had 7 top twelves. Does consistency trump a season with more top finishes but a few poor aberrations?
In 2006, both KVD and Ike missed one check and KVD did the same again in 2008.
Take That to the Bank
For those anglers who think that green is the only color that matters, it might come down to average winnings (gross) per tournament. For the sake of making an apples-to-apples comparison, we’ll remove any Angler of the Year bonuses but leave in other single-event bonuses (like the Berkley Heavyweight awards) which contributed to the bottom line on a per-event basis.
Obviously, this means that wins, which pay far more than second place finishes, will substantially bolster an angler’s per event winnings. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that KVD’s 2008 season, which included two wins, has the highest average winnings per regular season event (for a completed season) at $30,682.
Skeet’s 2009 season produced the lower average winnings per regular season event, $13,189, although KVD’s $14,959 per event in 2006 (adjusted to $16,455 if Santee is removed) is only a bit higher.
Right now Skeet is averaging $47,000 in gross winnings per tournament.
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