COLUMBIA, S.C. – This year, the Columbia PFG College Fishing Presented by Abu Garcia National Championship kicks off the season, with the best teams from the 2025 campaign headed to Lake Murray for the showdown. Set for Feb. 12-14, the event should showcase some of the peak weights possible on Murray, and with 162 teams qualified for the event, pretty much every heavy-hitting college angler will be there.
What’s on the line
The National Championship pays out $43,500 to the winning team in the form of a new Phoenix boat and cash, plus the winning team goes on to fish in the Toyota Series Championship for a chance to make REDCREST. Second place also wins a boat and makes the Toyota Series Championship as pros, and third place earns $4,000 and makes the championship as co-anglers. Overall, the Top 10 payout will be worth more than $90,000, making it the richest event in college fishing.
In 2025, University of Montevallo teammates Brody Robison and Peyton Sorrow earned the win, and Robison topped Sorrow last fall at Grand Lake to qualify for REDCREST. This spring, he’ll take off with the biggest names in the game for a shot at history on Table Rock. In this event, Sorrow and Robison will be looking to go back-to-back, but it certainly won’t be a cakewalk.
Winter is a great time to be on Murray
A former collegiate angler and local to Murray, Lucas Murphy is as in-tune with the lake as can be. According to him, February could produce some really big weights, but it may not come easy.
“It’s going to be hard for someone who doesn’t fish the lake to find consistency across three days,” he said. “It’s a herring lake, which in the winter is a little less relevant, but the best way to describe a herring lake is ‘random.’ The fish are going to be on the move, they’re not going to be in one place for too long. There are going to be people who thought they found fish and can’t catch them, and people who run into them. It feels like the biggest fish in the lake all live by themselves, and you’re going to run into one or two here and there.”
Murphy explained that while running ditches with LiveScope is a viable pattern for numbers, the biggest fish in the lake tend to live by themselves and gravitate toward rock and crawfish in the wintertime.
“Murray isn’t like the Tennessee River lakes where it is going to get won on a minnow,” he said. “The biggest bags in local tournaments, it’s a lot of shallow stuff, a lot of fishing a jig, a lot of fishing places where you can’t see them. We don’t have the luxury of just trolling through the middle of a creek until you see them.
“It’s mostly going to be hard-bottom related, whether it is rock in a foot of water or rock in 30 foot of water,” he said. “These guys are good enough with their electronics, and the mapping is so good, there’s not a lot hidden.”
The whole lake could play
In most big tournaments on Murray, the lower end of the lake is the big focus, with one or two anglers figuring out how to excel up the lake. This year, Murphy thinks more of the lake is in play than ever.
“In the past two years, over the span of a three-day tournament, I would say whoever wins is going to be in the lower end of the lake – that’s where it’s most consistent, that is where the water is cleaner,” he said. “But, we’ve had no storms, no big rains, nothing that has made the tributaries dirty. I have a hunch that the lake is going to be cleaner throughout than it normally is. The fish eat a lot of herring in the spring and the summer, and I think they spend a lot of time being visual feeders – the majority used to be down the lake. If the whole lake is clear, the whole thing will be in play – I think water clarity will be a big factor.”
Still, Murphy isn’t shy about what history indicates – staying down the lake is where the top-end fish often are.
“The farther up the lake you are, the more consistent it is going to be for quick starts in the morning and stuff like that,” he said. “Mid-lake and main lake, you might not get many bites, but if you swing the bat, there’s a good chance it’s a big one. Once you get to 17 pounds, you’re one bite away from a big bag.”
Of course, that one bite isn’t likely to be easy to get.
“If I had to bet on someone to win it, it wouldn’t be a local,” Murphy said. “It would be someone who finds something and runs with it. There are bigger bags being caught now than ever in places that make me scratch my head, and they are more finicky and harder to get to bite than ever.”
Capacity of the scales is likely to be tested
The last few years, the National Championship has been something of a slugfest, and this one figures to be more of the same.
“There’s going to be a lot of big bags caught,” Murphy said. “Last year, pretty much all of February, it took 26 to 27 pounds to win one-day tournaments. Looking at my stats I tracked from last year, the two weekends around when they’ll be there, I caught 25 pounds both weekends and finished third in both tournaments. So, they’re gonna catch ‘em.”