By MLF Communications
BAY CITY, Mich. – Jacob Wheeler couldn’t help himself.
Time had already run out in Saginaw Bay Bass Pro Tour with Wheeler atop SCORETRACKER, his 10th career Bass Pro Tour win secured. Yet after Wheeler addressed the MLFNOW! viewers and offered some thank yous to those who had helped him get his tournament fishing start growing up in Indiana, he picked his rod back up and pitched a topwater frog back to the clump of reeds and lily pads in front of his boat, trying to elicit one more blowup.
"I can't help it. I'm just a kid," Wheeler quipped as he reeled in.
He's certainly turned the Bass Pro Tour into his playground.
Needing only to finish 27th or better to secure his fourth Fishing Clash Angler of the Year title in the past five seasons, he could have played it safe, then celebrated and gone through the motions after he secured the hardware on Friday. Instead, he not only made Sunday’s Championship Round but overcame an early 22-pound deficit to Todd Faircloth and willed his way to a win in a three-way battle with Faircloth and Edwin Evers. His total of 110 pounds even on 42 scorable bass ultimately topped Faircloth by 7-6.
For the win, Wheeler earned $150,000 – he’ll leave Saginaw Bay with $250,000 and two trophies thanks to his AOY victory. The dream conclusion to yet another dominant season left even Wheeler, who is no stranger to recapping victories, short for words.
“I still don’t know what to say, to be honest with you,” he said with a chuckle. “I don’t even believe it half the time. I just go fishing and things happen. I’m just speechless. It’s crazy, it really is.”
Wheeler took his first lead of the Championship Round with about 10 minutes left in Period 2. From there, he and Faircloth traded blows, the top spot on SCORETRACKER changing hands six times during the final period. Wheeler finally took the lead for good by catching a 2-11 with 40 minutes left, then added five more scorable bass to pull away.
In typical Wheeler fashion, he pointed not to those bites that earned him win No. 10 but a series of decisions that started on the opening day of the event.
Wheeler spent the first period of Day 1 fishing for smallmouth on the outer edges of the competition boundary. Using a drop-shot and forward-facing sonar, he stacked up nearly 52 pounds, then spent the rest of the day largemouth fishing amid the shallow vegetation that lines Saginaw Bay. In the third period, he hit a key area that yielded more than 30 pounds in about 90 minutes.
On the second day of qualifying, he once again sampled both shallow largemouth and offshore smallmouth, this time starting on the green fish. Like the rest of the field, he found the smallmouth bite to be getting tougher, making it difficult to justify the hour or so it would take to travel from largemouth habitat to smallmouth waters (or vice versa).
So, Wheeler committed to frogging for largemouth during the Knockout Round. While he finished third, easily advancing to Championship Sunday, he knew the area he’d fished, which he shared with Brent Ehrler, wasn’t likely to hold up for another day.
“After basically sharing one stretch with Ehrler, I’m like, I’m not going to win this tournament sharing fish, especially after we beat on them this bad,” Wheeler said. “It was just not going to happen. I knew we’d probably catch some fish there in the morning, and then after that, it was going to be all about making the right decisions, and I’m going to have to have some stuff that I can get away from.”
Sunday morning, Wheeler (and just about everyone else in the Top 10) found the bite slower than a day prior. Faircloth, on the other hand, landed on an offshore school of largemouth and piled on 17 scorable bass for 44-3 in the opening hour and a half. At that point, he’d more than doubled every other angler on the water. He finished the first period with 50 pounds exactly, 17-4 ahead of Wheeler.
Wheeler knew he needed to find a fresh spot. He considered loading his boat on the trailer and heading for smallmouth waters. But first, he figured he’d check the area that had produced for him on Thursday afternoon. He hadn’t been back since, figuring no other angler would find it since it was only accessible with a long idle.
At first, Wheeler couldn’t relocate his fish. A couple times in the second period, he wondered aloud whether to stay or go. Eventually, a few hundred yards away from where he’d caught them on Day 1, he started to get bites in bunches. In the span of 1 hour, 22 minutes, he boated 13 scorable bass for 33-12 and climbed all the way to the top of SCORETRACKER®.
“When I found them, it was pretty apparent that they all decided to show up right there,” he said. “And I knew when that sort of happened and we caught them like that, there’s a good chance we can win this tournament.”
Wheeler targeted a mixture of reeds and lily pads in about a foot of water, catching almost all his bass with a frog but mixing in a Rapala CrushCity Bronco Bug. The key to his area, he believes, was that it wasn’t full of submerged vegetation.
“You had a lot of reeds and pads there that were really clean, meaning there wasn’t a lot of grass that was choking them out,” he explained. “Even though it was super, super shallow, it was a deal where they could swim around and they could live in there; they had room to swim around. Where if you have choked out pads or reeds, they’re not as good. A little bit of grass is good, but not a whole lot of grass.”
As the third period ticked by and he and Faircloth remained neck-and-neck, Wheeler leaned on his ample experience in tight Bass Pro Tour finishes. Not only had he hoisted nine red trophies entering this event, he’s fallen just short a few times, too, including a pair of runner-up finishes this season.
Instead of skewing his decision-making, the pressure sharpened it. Wheeler, the ultimate competitor, entered “kill mode.”
“I know what it takes to win,” Wheeler said. “When I get in those positions, I get in kill mode. You do everything to push you mentally to keep your mind sharp and make the right cast, and every cast matters and every fish matters. You get it to where you’re just like locked and trained to focus on that.”
The last key decision he made was leaving the spot where he’d relocated his fish from Day 1. Perceiving that the bass had noticed his presence and scattered, Wheeler trolled out toward his starting spot and then back again, picking off a few bass on the way. He arrived at the juice with about an hour left and promptly caught eight more scorable bass.
“I didn’t stay in there,” he said. “I went back out and I was able to catch a few and sort of settle back down and come back in the last hour basically and close it out.”
While Wheeler is no stranger to the winner’s circle, this victory carries significance for a few reasons. For one, it’s his first national win on a frog, one of his favorite techniques and something he said he “cut my teeth doing.”
It also represented the perfect ending to a season-long redemption tour. Earlier this year, he finished in the top six at Lake Conroe, the Harris Chain of Lakes and Lake Murray – all fisheries where he’d failed to make the Knockout Round during previous BPT visits. While he’d fared better in his first event on Saginaw Bay, finishing eighth in the 2023 regular-season finale, Wheeler had to watch another angler, Matt Becker, hoist both the Stage 7 and AOY trophies after that event. Finishing second to Becker by 4 points, that’s the only time in the past five years Wheeler’s campaign hasn’t ended with AOY hardware in hand.
He admitted that was on his mind this week. This time, Wheeler made sure it was him who gets to ride off into the offseason as a double winner.
“It definitely gave me a sour taste in my mouth,” he said. “I caught them and Top 10’d, but I just didn’t perform that week. I had a bad Championship Day... So, I was focused and determined that this one wouldn’t get me. I controlled my own destiny that day, and I lost, which is what it’s about. Thankfully, I didn’t have the Angler of the Year pressure on me (today), but I was able to focus and just call it good.”
Final Results
1. Jacob Wheeler – 42, 110-0 – $150,000
2. Todd Faircloth – 40, 102-10 – $45,000
3. Edwin Evers – 36, 86-10 – $35,000
4. Cole Floyd – 26, 66-2 – $30,000
5. Brent Ehrler – 25, 61-2 – $25,000
6. Bryan Thrift – 23, 58-0 – $23,000
7. Nick Hatfield – 23, 54-12 – $22,000
8. Spencer Shuffield – 21, 49-15 – $21,000
9. Keith Carson – 18, 45-7 – $20,500
10. James Elam – 18, 43-6 – $20,000
