A Grand Lake game plan?

Pensacola Dam at Grand Lake O' The Cherokees

I don’t mind saying I was pulling for the Broncos, but to be honest with you, that’s about the extent of my fan loyalty.

I get asked a lot, “What’s your favorite NFL team?” or “What’s your favorite college basketball team or college football team?” It’s weird – I don’t just pick a team and root for that team. No matter what it is, I like to watch the big games.

I’ll watch anything from girls’ basketball to hockey. And I don’t necessarily watch all through the season, but if a big game is on, I like to watch the big name athletes and see how they perform under pressure.

It’s the competition that I like, but if one team starts to blow it out, I’ll lose interest and change the channel.

There’s a strong connection here to the upcoming GEICO Bassmaster Classic on Grand Lake  I think it’s going to be very competitive and very entertaining for fans of the sport.

We’re counting the days, and I’ve started to think about it more and more recently. I’m doing more of that hard-nosed preparing and organizing. I’ve been fishing quite a bit and making sure everything on the boat is good and that everything I need is on order.

I don’t want to say that these are the “final preparations,” but the pre-preparations. I’m just trying to get ready.

I’m also starting to play out the scenarios in my head. I’m thinking about conditions and what could happen here, what could happen there. It’s definitely been on my mind more than it has been in the past few months.

It’s interesting because, even though the Super Bowl involves two teams and the Classic has 55 individual competitors, there’s a strong similarity. Those two football teams are going to do whatever they think they’ve got to do to win.

If they don’t win, it doesn’t really matter, and I think that’s how it is in the Classic. Most people are going to remember the angler that won, just like most people are going to remember the team that won a Super Bowl.

I’d rather finish 40th and know that I went for it than to finish 10th and know that I fished conservatively. This is the biggest stage, by far, in bass fishing, and you only get one opportunity per year – and sometimes you don’t even get that opportunity.

Whenever you get that opportunity, you need to make sure that after it’s over – win, lose or draw – you can step back and say, “Yep, I really tried to win.”

One point that naturally comes up whenever somebody lives fairly close to where the Classic will be held is kind of like home-field advantage during the NFL playoffs. I’ve spent plenty of time on Grand Lake, but there are a couple of reasons why the idea of local knowledge really isn’t that big of a deal for me.

For one thing, Grand Lake is just too good of a lake for anyone to make any assumptions. There are too many places where the tournament could be won and too many patterns that a guy could win on.

The other thing is that the local advantage isn’t as good as you might think because I haven’t fished there as much since I started fishing professionally.

Of course there’s another big consideration and that’s the recent flood conditions. I haven’t even driven around the lake since the cut-off, but I imagine it’s going to be very different and we’re all going to be starting from scratch.

I haven’t started to formulate a game plan. I’m hoping that in three weeks that some things change a little bit. I don’t want to have any plan that might change in practice.

The biggest thing is that I just want to fish with an open mind. I want to fish what’s in front of me and not think too much about what I used to fish eight or nine years ago. I don’t even want to develop a plan in practice.

The big thing that we have to consider is that there’s a lot more time between the start of practice and the first day of Classic competition than there is for a regular-season Elite Series event. Things can change a lot during that time, so I just want to make my observations and get a general idea of what’s going on.

If I can figure that out, I can use some of my history to be able to run that stuff. The first and hardest and most important thing is figuring out what’s going on.

As far as performance, every guy that’ll be fishing Grand Lake knows this is bass fishing’s biggest event. But just like every matchup on a football field, you have to do a better job.

You hope that you’ve figured out something that nobody else has. You just have to figure out those fine details that get you more bites than everybody else.