New BassFan World Rankings Debut

The new BassFan World Rankings make their debut today. Why new? Why now? For the answers to those questions and more, read the following Q&A. We anticipated the most popular questions, and the answers are supplied by BassFan staffers, including our semi-resident math guru.

Why change the World Rankings?

A couple of reasons. The biggest is that the tour/series landscape has been changing pretty regularly, and it's changing big-time this year. The original BassFan World Rankings were set up to handle two tours and a specific number-range of events. Those parameters obviously have changed. This year we have four rankable circuits – the Bassmaster Elite Series, the Bassmaster Majors, the FLW Tour and the FLW Series – along with three championships.

The existing World Rankings did what they were supposed to do, which was measure performance over time on the tours and in the championships. They did that extremely well, but it was obvious the sport – which is constantly changing – needed a more flexible rankings methodology.

How are the new World Rankings different?

Before, each angler got points based on where he finished, including bonus points for placing in the Top 20. Championships were handled differently. Now each event is weighted by the strength of the field and the size of the field, and then points for finishing are allocated.

The strength of field is calculated based on the World Rankings of everyone fishing the tournament. Those who have never fished a tour/series event will start at zero and will be ranked when they fish a tour-level event. In other words, now everyone that fishes a tour/series event gets ranked, whereas before you needed to fish 2 years to be eligible to be ranked. This way the strength of a field can be calculated exactly.

When it comes to field size, the basic assumptions are that it's a lot easier to beat 49 or 24 people than it is to beat 99 or 199.

So in general, events like the Elite 50s and the championships have higher strength of field weights but lower size of field weights (championships will still be handled a bit differently than other events –Ed.). The opposite is true for the FLW Tour and the FLW Series, which have 200-boat fields.

Does that mean that the two factors balance each other out so that everything – every event – is weighted equally?

No. The two factors interact, but each tour, or series, and every event is different.

BassFan's position has been that the Elite 50s/Majors were not rankable because a significant part of the field qualified in a way that was not related to current performance. So why include them in the new World Rankings formula?

Correct. All-time money list qualification was the main reason they weren't included. Why should all-time money list qualifiers get a lot of points for fishing small-field events when some weren't fishing well enough to deserve those points? It didn't make sense.

But as you can tell from the strength of field and size of field factors, we figured out a way to skin that cat. Now anglers who fished the Elite 50s or who fish the Majors who haven't been setting the world on fire with their performance will be accounted for in the strength of field calculation.

Another reason we decided to include them was because a few pros were saying we should. Obviously these were the guys who were doing well in the E50s, but maybe they had a point.

Where we came out philosophically was that the (former) Bassmaster Tour schedule was jammed into 6 weeks in the spring. That meant that anglers who did better in the spring were doing well in the rankings while anglers who were better summer fishermen were in effect being penalized in the World Rankings because of boundaries, or tournament formats, they had no control over. They were just fishing the formats BASS gave them to fish.

So if we wanted to include (the E50s), we had to figure out a way to include them fairly. Saying you will weight events by strength and size of field is pretty easy. Figuring out the math so that five or more different categories of events get treated equally is a different story. That was really complicated.

We also wanted to make sure the E50s were going to be around for a while. At the rate BASS was changing things, there was no guarantee that the E50s would be around for more than a year or two. So it would've been foolish of us to spend a lot of time and money making changes to such an important index without some kind of certainty there.

Professional bass fishing has four different rankable trails and three championships, all with different-size fields. How difficult was it to figure out how to incorporate all of that?

Extremely. It's not just the size of the fields, it's everything else. You have five different tournament formats, five different sets of rules, the fact that all the best fishermen don't fish the same events – it's unusual in pro sports, to say the least. It can all be accounted for in a World Rankings system, but it's tough.

The last time the rankings were tweaked, (BassFan CEO) Jay Kumar said they were the most complicated in professional sports. If they weren't then, they are now.

Are any World Rankings in other sports similar?

To greater or lesser extents, they are all similar. But bass fishing is a unique animal, especially in this phase of the sport's growth, or evolution.

One that's similar in some ways is golf. There you have the PGA Tour (in the U.S.) and the European Tour. The athletes who compete on one tour or the other typically don't golf against each other. But the Official World Golf Ranking accounts for that and they all show up in the same rankings.

It helps that the formats and the rules are the same, meaning you know that at least that part of the playing field is even. In bass fishing the rules and formats between the tours/series are similar, but not the same.

Qualification also is an issue in fishing. The two new series (the Bassmaster Elite Series and the FLW Series) this year were created out of thin air – not really any qualifying.

FLW Tour qualifying isn't strict, and if they're short a few anglers they sign people up at the boat ramp. That would not happen on the PGA Tour.

E50/Major qualifying isn't strict either. The E50s were going in the right direction, from a performance-based standard standpoint, but this year and for at least 2 years after this one, the Majors will draw from a trail where your appearance in the field isn't based on performance, it's based on the ability to pay. That's fairly arbitrary.

If it ever happens that qualifying for a major bass fishing tour or series is based only on performance, those events might have to carry a higher weight in the rankings. But right now, fishing still has a ways to go in terms of performance criteria to be like a pro sport.

How was this edition of the World Rankings calculated?

We didn't just calculate new rankings based on the Okeechobee FLW Tour event and then slap them on the final 2005 rankings. We recalculated 4 years' worth of tournament data, including the E50s and the recent Okeechobee event, to get this set.

Lots of people moved around.

That will happen when there is a change in the formula. Anglers at the top of the rankings will move around less than guys at the bottom, where's there's more variability in the points. Over time the amount of movement will level off – it won't be so dramatic.

Kevin VanDam is number 1 again. How about more examples of notable movement?

Let's start with Kevin first. He's number one because he usually finishes high and because he had three wins in a row – not because Elite 50 events are a lot higher-weighted than tour events. Also, Greg Hackney has outfished everyone big-time on the tours the last couple of years, including Kevin. If Greg had fished the E50s last year, he might still be number 1, even with Kevin's three wins. But probably not. Either way, these two anglers have been fishing head and shoulders above everyone else.

Marty Stone had been number 2 in the world and now he's 9th. That's because Marty has fished well in the spring and not so well in the summer E50 events. It's tough to tell that just by looking at the standings – a 43rd, as one example, doesn't look so bad. But when you finish 43rd out of 50, that's not good.

E50s do in fact have high strength of field weights, but the size of the field is where Marty – and guys like George Cochran – get hurt. On the flip side, guys like Davy Hite and Gerald Swindle get helped because they did well in the E50s.

Those are just examples of movement due to moving from one calculation method to another. Over time, the amount of movement from event to event will for the most part not be as drastic.

Can you give everyone some insight on the strength of field between the tours and series?

Not for 2006 – not yet – because we haven't had an Elite Series or FLW Series event yet. But looking at the data historically, we did notice a few trends.

One is that Bassmaster Tour events usually had higher strength of fields than FLW Tour events. That's partly because more higher-ranked anglers fished (the BASS events), but it's also because the fields are smaller. In other words, if you have 75 good anglers in a 150-boat field, that's better in terms of strength of field than 75 good anglers in a 200-boat field.

So when some BASS-only fishermen say that BASS fields are stronger, that's not really the case – or at least not to the extent they think it is. The top FLW Tour fishermen as a group are generally as good statistically as the top BASS fishermen. It's just that the bigger FLW fields mean that more lesser-skilled, or lower-ranked, anglers are in the field, which pulls down the overall strength of field for that event.

That might happen with the Bassmaster Elite Series events this year. The strength of field for those events might be lower because they will have so many unranked or low-ranked anglers. But who knows. We will have to wait and see.

Notable

> Most of the same parameters – including a rolling 2 calendar years – are still in place. Click here to read more in About the World Rankings.

> Time-weighting of events – recent finishes count more – is now more like golf's.

> There will still be cases of counter-intuitive movement, meaning a good performance might cause a drop in the rankings and vice versa. This occurs for several reasons – notably the 2-year timeframe, and the fact that all anglers' points are calculated and then each angler is ranked – and happens with all statistical World Rankings.

> There could be some strange rankings effects from two Bassmaster Classics being fished so closely in time to one another.

> New fishermen (e.g., rookies) will now be ranked immediately. They might be good, but until they fish enough tour-level events, and do well relative to other good fishermen, their rankings will be low.

> The BassFan World Rankings can now include any top-level tournaments, not just BASS, FLW and BassFan events.

> The World Rankings are not a popularity contest. They measure performance statistically, and all anglers are treated the same.

> State Farm is no longer the title sponsor of the BassFan World Rankings.