Another season, another championship appearance for Todd Faircloth.
Is anyone really surprised, though? The easy-going Texan, known for his astonishing consistency over the years, qualified for the Bassmaster Classic for 13 straight years from 2007-19, logging top-10 finishes on six occasions.
When the Bass Pro Tour season kicked off in January, it was difficult to predict which 30 anglers would be left standing when it came time to determine the field for Redcrest, the circuit’s inaugural championship event set to begin tomorrow on Pool 8 of the Mississippi River near La Crosse, Wis. Faircloth had some experience under the Major League Fishing format, but it was tough to gauge who would navigate the full-time transition away from a five-fish format the best.
Faircloth more than answered the bell with a sixth-place finish in points, highlighted by top-5 showings at Lake Chickamauga and Smith Lake and back-to-back 15th-place efforts to close the season at Table Rock and Lake Winnebago.
“I’m not surprised, but there were a lot of unknowns going into it,” Faircloth said recently. “As the year went along, we got a little more comfortable with how to navigate the format and even practice for it. I know, personally, I got a lot more comfortable.”
A comfortable Faircloth is often a dangerous Faircloth. He said once he settled into a practice routine, the rest fell into place.
“The biggest thing for me was when you only get 1 1/2 days to practice you tend to go into an area, get a few bites and instead of fishing all of it, I’d idle around and look around and familiarize myself with it and fish it during the tournament,” he said. “Before, we’d pick it apart or spend more time actually fishing it.”
Another thing he discovered this season is it can be difficult to recover from a slow start.
“If you’re in a five-fish limit deal, you can have a bad hour or make a bad decision and make up for it, but in our format, you can’t afford to do that,” he said. “It’s hard to hide in this format if you’re not on them. In a five-fish deal – we’ve all done it – you can make something out of nothing. You can be ahead of the guy who caught three times more fish than you, but you caught a 4- or 5-pounder. The MLF format separates guys who really are dialed in from the guys who are just going along.”
Don’t expect Faircloth to be one of the guys ‘going along’ in La Crosse. The upper Mississippi has been very good to him over the years. He won the first Elite Series event there in 2012 and finished sixth the following year. In the 2016 MLF Summit Cup, he took second. Needless to say, he’s anxious to see what this week has in store.
“I like fishing up here. It’s always clicked for me,” he said. “I feel like I understand what to look for. When you have that much shallow grass or cover, there’s an opportunity to find a group of fish nobody else is going to find. That’s the neat thing about it.”
