By John Johnson
BassFan Senior Editor

Michael Neal began the defense of his 2021 MLF Pro Circuit Angler of the Year (AOY) title as well as he possibly could – he won the '22 season opener at Sam Rayburn Reservoir in Texas. Everything was looking peachy until late April, when he turned in a 105th-place stinker at Alabama's Pickwick Lake.

That bomb, in the third event of the campaign, dropped him to 14th place on the points list, 51 behind new leader Spencer Shuffield.

"I thought (the quest for a repeat) was for sure over right there," he said last week prior to competing in the Bass Pro Tour derby at Cayuga Lake, where he finished 10th. "I thought there was no way I was going to get back in it."

He pulled it off, though – his 15th-place showing at Lake Champlain in the recent Pro Circuit regular-season finale gave him a second consecutive title. He finished with 1,068 points, which was 18 more than runner-up and fellow BPT competitor Justin Lucas.

He's the third Pro Circuit (formerly FLW Tour) competitor to achieve the back-to-back feat, joining David Dudley (2011-12) and Andy Morgan (2012-13).

The reward for winning the Pro Circuit AOY is paid entries for the following season. This year, Neal earned $172,500 from that tour without having to pay anything up front.

He's also having another good year on the BPT, sitting at No. 18 on the points list after the Cayuga event.

"I think a lot of the success has come from just spending all that time on the water," he said. "I foresee myself continuing to fish two (tours) for a while."

The fiasco at Pickwick really just came down to one bad decision.

"I fished the way that I knew better than to do," he said. "I went way up the (Tennessee) River and fished the bank. I knew the water was going to drop and once I was up there I didn't have any way to adjust.

"The lake was pretty windy and rough in practice and I knew all the (tournament-caught) fish got hauled up to the north end and tournaments had been won up there. I fell into that trap."

Now he heads to the St. Lawrence River for the TITLE Championship. It's a venue where he posted a couple of strong showings last year – 17th in a BPT tournament and 11th in a Pro Circuit outing.

"That's my next goal – to win a championship event on one side or the other," he said. "I've won a tournament on both circuits and I've got two AOYs, so that's what I want next."

There was a time when he dreaded the northern brown-fish factories where he's made so much hay over the past couple of seasons.

"I used to absolutely hate smallmouth fishing, but now I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of what it takes to catch them," he said. "I used to try to make them act like largemouth and get them to relate to (some type of physical cover), but now I think that the only thing outside of current that they relate to is bait.

"They're not necessarily concerned with brushpiles or rock; they're just constantly roaming around with the bait."