Two Trophies, Two Totally Different Games
Same week, same species pool, two tournaments that couldn’t have played out more
differently. MLF closed out the Bass Pro Tour season on Lake Erie with a straight-up
beatdown. B.A.S.S. spent four days up on Champlain proving that taking away forward-
facing sonar doesn’t make a tournament boring — it just makes it honest. Let’s get into both,
because there’s more going on here than “who won.”
Lucas Goes Back to the Scene of the Crime
Justin Lucas hadn’t won a national title in six years — the longest drought of his career, and
one that had him openly wondering if his last win might have been his last one, period. Then
Suzuki Marine Stage 7 landed back on Lake Erie — the exact water where that six-year-old
win happened — and Lucas did something you basically never see: he ran back the identical
winning formula. Same lake, same bait, a Berkley PowerBait MaxScent Flat Worm on a drop-
shot, black in the mornings and green pumpkin the rest of the day. Not “a similar setup.” The
literal same bait.
98 pounds, 11 ounces, nearly 20 pounds clear of second, worth $125,000. Six bass over 5
pounds on the final day alone, topped by a 6-11 that also took Big Bass. Afterward he
admitted it barely felt real — just big fish, biting all day. And after years of Erie’s smallmouth
fishery going through boom-and-bust cycles, his read was simple: the lake’s back.
Here’s what actually matters, though — his old spots from 2020 were dead. All of them. He
didn’t win by nostalgia-fishing his old milk run. He rebuilt it 40 miles away, closer to the
Detroit River mouth, using the same tool but zero of the same water. That’s the real lesson,
and it’s the one people are going to skip past because “he threw the same bait” is the easier
headline.
There’s also a grudge match buried in this result that’s worth knowing. Lucas beat Jacob
Wheeler by exactly 1 ounce for this same title back in 2020. This year, same two names,
same 1-2 finish — just a lot less suspense. And it wasn’t even the first time they’d crossed
swords in 2026: earlier this season at Stage 4 on O.H. Ivie, Lucas led the Championship
Round early before Wheeler ran him down and stole the win. So this wasn’t just Lucas
ending a six-year drought — it was Lucas getting one back on Wheeler in the same season.
Before this week, Lucas had finished runner-up four times and made the Top 10 at 18
national events since his last win. That’s the real shape of the drought, not just “six years.”
Jacob Wheeler took second again — same finishing order as 2020, way less drama this time
— and did it by refusing to specialize. ChatterBait and a CrushCity Mooch Minnow on grass
edges for largemouth, a jig, a Carolina rig, then a three-crank rotation (Rapala DT12/14/16)
sized up as the smallmouth got deeper or more pressured. Michael Neal ran his 2021 waterin reverse for third, drop-shotting a Yamamoto Shad Shape Worm around any irregularity in
12-16 feet.
Worth a footnote: this was only the second time ever that a national-level tournament has
been held solely on Lake Erie itself, without Detroit River or St. Clair access. The first was
the 2020 event — the one Lucas also won.
Cole Floyd Is the One I Keep Coming Back To
He didn’t win. Fourth place, 64-9. But sit with what actually happened: Floyd, the only Ohio
home-state angler in the field, opened the tournament by shattering the BPT’s single-period
record — 87 pounds in the first two hours alone — and did it almost entirely on largemouth,
on a lake the whole field assumed would be decided by smallmouth. One smallie all week,
mixed in shallow with the largemouth almost by accident. That opening burst was enough to
carry him to the automatic Championship Round berth outright.
His edge wasn’t a secret bait — 3/8-ounce green pumpkin Strike King Thunder Cricket with
a Rage Bug trailer, plus a Rage Thumper Worm, nothing exotic. It was where he pointed it:
grass interior, not edges. Holes and openings where fish were grouped up tight, not the
community stuff everybody else was picking apart. Championship Sunday cooled off
relative to his qualifying binge, sure, but a broken record and a 4th-place finish is not a fade,
and I’m not going to let the framing call it one. The story is that he found an entire
community pattern nobody else in the field touched, on water where the “obvious” play was
staring everyone in the face and wrong.
Quiet Excellence, Erie Edition
Brent Ehrler’s 5th top-10 in his last 6 BPT starts is the kind of stat that doesn’t trend and
should. All smallmouth, drop-shot primary, but the detail worth stealing is his Garmin SideVü
rigged to scan forward off the back transducer as a stand-in search tool whenever he had
LiveScope switched off — he called it a revelation, and I believe him. Jeff Sprague ran the
Canadian side exclusively, all drop-shot, all rock, including subtle small-rock flats that barely
registered on ActiveTarget but held the better fish. Marshall Hughes caught 16 pounds in 7
minutes to sneak into the Championship Round. Ott DeFoe covered more water than anyone
in the field and didn’t lose a single fish all week after switching to a 1/0 VMC Redline drop-
shot hook — first time that’s ever happened for him. And Zack Birge fished exactly as
conservatively as a 12-point AOY lead demands, banked a largemouth limit early, then
settled into a rock bar loaded with smallmouth, walleye, and drum to lock up his first Angler
of the Year title without ever needing to press.
Even the local guides came away without a tidy takeaway. Lake Erie fishing guide Pat
Upthagrove said afterward that it was genuinely hard to point to one winning formula —
largemouth or smallmouth, lake or river, it could’ve been won almost anywhere. No one area
or species dominated — that’s not a knock on the coverage, that’s just what actuallyhappened.
Champlain: No Sonar, No Excuses
Coin flip put Champlain in the no-FFS bucket this year, and it completely changed the shape
of the tournament. Take away the ability to run down roaming smallmouth in open water and
you get exactly what we got: a shallow, blind-water hunting contest where history and gut
instinct mattered more than screens.
Bryan Schmitt won his third career Champlain title — 2016 Northern Open, 2021 Elite, now
this — by refusing to lock into one program. Isolated hard spots, rock mixed with vegetation,
fished top to bottom: a SPRO Bronzeye Poppin’ Frog on top, a SPRO RkCrawler 55 in the
middle, a drop-shot with a Missile Baits Magic Worm down deep. He started 10th on Day 1
and built the entire way, closing with 18-13 to win by a single pound over Chris Johnston and
take home $100,000. In his own telling, he fell hard for this lake the first time he fished it
years ago — stumbled onto a couple of special spots early and never looked back. Coming
off the win, he called himself speechless, and made a point of saying how much respect he
had for the rest of the Top 10.
There’s a nice arc across his three Champlain wins, if you know the history. The 2016 win
came on a straightforward crayfish-imitator pattern. The 2021 win came down to a single
3½-pound smallmouth caught 15 minutes before weigh-in on LiveScope — by his own
admission, that one fish was the difference between winning and not. This year, in a no-FFS
format, there was no lucky tech-assisted catch to lean on. Just a grind — he described his
final-round search as basically random, going spot to spot and getting lucky here and there.
Three wins, three completely different ways of getting there.
The Urchin Bait Isn’t a Fluke Anymore
This is the part I actually want you to sit with. Three of the top 10 at Champlain — Chris
Johnston (2nd), Brandon Lester (6th), Cory Johnston (7th) — all credited an urchin-style
bait this week. Johnston ran the Hideup Coike Fullcast, the same bait that nearly sold out
domestically after Chris Johnston’s own Santee Cooper win. Lester threw a 19mm urchin on
a 4x4 Baits prototype hook. Cory Johnston split time on 6th Sense’s Abstract. That’s three
anglers, three different setups, one lake that has nothing in common with Santee Cooper —
different region, different species mix, zero forward-facing sonar allowed. And Chris
Johnston straight up told reporters he was running low on Coikes mid-week because “they
don’t reload a lot.” That’s not marketing copy, that’s a guy on the water saying the supply
chain can’t keep up with the bite. If you’ve been skeptical that urchin baits are a real
category and not a hype cycle, this is your evidence. I’ve been tracking this since Santee
Cooper for a reason.The Rest of the Field Tells Its Own Stories
Seth Feider mixed species most of the week, then went all-in on smallmouth Sunday,
flipping a drop-shot into deep grass for third. Caleb Sumrall found the trestles of an old
railroad bridge and just mined them — heavy flipping gear into skirted jigs, upsizing to a
3/4-ounce SPRO CJ Flip when he needed to punch through faster; he also picked up $2,000
for the tournament’s Monster Bag with a Day 2 limit of 24-4. Drew Cook’s 5th-place finish
wasn’t a new trick, it was the same weightless SPRO Wacky Snack that’s carried his entire
season — that’s a consistency story, not a one-week pattern, and it deserves to be treated
like one; he backed the finish up with $5,500 in contingency money on top of his payout.
Beau Browning worked grass contour breaks with a ChatterBait Elite EVO and backed it up
with a Carolina rig and a finesse drop-shot for the shallower stuff. Lee Livesay used three
baits to cover the whole water column, and one of them — the 6th Sense Dogma — is the
exact bait he used to top-10 this same lake back in 2021. Five years later, same lure, same
result. Some patterns just don’t expire.
And then there’s Carl Jocumsen, who led Day 1 and Day 2 on a long largemouth run out to
Ticonderoga and finished 10th. Leading a tournament and winning one are not the same
skill, and Champlain reminded everybody of that this week.
One more thing worth flagging: Bassmaster’s own pre-event scouting called this one before
it happened, noting in their preview that Schmitt “shouldn’t be as affected by no FFS” given
his history on the lake. Sometimes the insiders really do see it coming.
My Take
Neither winner in either event beat the field with a secret weapon. Lucas won by throwing
the most obvious bait on the lake with total conviction on water he had to rebuild from
scratch, and by beating his biggest rival twice in one season along the way. Schmitt won by
refusing to marry one pattern and grinding structure until something produced, on his third
completely different path to the same trophy. If you’re building your own game plan off
either of these events, that’s the transferable piece — not the specific lure, the discipline
behind picking it and the willingness to actually go find new water instead of running
memories.
What’s Coming
One more thing before you go. Right now Winner Watch is built around whatever
tournament trail is putting out the best story that week. Next year that changes — we’re
expanding to full-season coverage across BFLs, MLF, the Bass Pro Tour, Bassmaster Elites,
Bassmaster Opens, the Tackle Warehouse Pro Circuit, and NPFL. Every level, every trail,
same standard: verified data, no filler, no “he threw a worm and won.” If you thought thisissue had a lot to dig into, wait until we’re running that breakdown every week across seven
circuits instead of two.
— Ryan