With David Dudley winning a deep-cranking tournament, there’s little this guy cannot do in bass fishing. He said it himself: Throwing deep crankbaits in the summertime has historically been his weakness. So what does he do? He works hard on his weakness and then goes out and wins a tournament that he really has no business winning. East Tennessee is loaded with local professional bass-fishing talent like Craig Powers, Andy Morgan, Wesley Strader, etc. – great crankbaiters, all – and Dudley topped them all on their home waters. Amazing.
So now the career earnings for David Dudley, Inc., have topped the $2.3 million mark and he’s not slowing down anytime soon, obviously. How much farther can he go?
Interesting note from a fantasy perspective: Despite all his cash from previous wins, today was Dudley’s first ever regular-season win on the FLW Tour. Yes, you read that right: Dudley has never won a regular-season event on the FLW Tour before today. He’s won the tour championship, the Ranger M1 tournament and even an FLW Series tournament – earning a lot of cash in the process – but never an FLW Tour event. In fact, Fort Loudoun-Tellico was his first top-10 finish of the season. That’s what makes him sort of a touchy pick, I find: He’s a superb angler, to be sure, but you’re never quite sure if he’s going to show up at an event.
That is, unless there’s a good half-million dollars or more on the line. Then he’s an automatic pick no matter where the tournament is.
That in mind, it’s sort of fascinating that Dudley was, in fact, the No.1 favorite pick by the overall numbers among all the fantasy players for this event. Apparently, there are tons of very knowledgeable fishing fans out there playing this game. At the outset of this event, I’m not even sure Dudley would have picked himself over the Tennessee guys like Powers and Morgan.
So we’re going to see some stout fantasy scoring on this one when it all shakes out. All of you who put Diamond Dave into that top spot – and there are many – are going to see a 2,000-point bonus. Because he had so many picks, though, Dudley’s an equalizer on this one. Same goes, to a lesser extent, for all those Powers and Morgan picks.
No, I think this one will boil down to the savvy few who managed to put Brandon Coulter fourth and/or Hank Cherry fifth. Maybe even a Jerry Green picked ninth or Ramie Colson in 10th will be the $100,000 difference for the Fort Loudoun-Tellico fantasy winner.
We’ll see in the next couple days after the scores are verified.