One of the first major bass tournaments of the year kicked off Wednesay at Falcon Lake in Zapata, Texas.

As expected, the weights were through the roof.

Bob Ramsdell of Sour Lake, Texas, is leading the Stren Series event with a five-bass limit that weighed 34 pounds, 13 ounces. By my math, that’s an average of almost 7 pounds per fish.

Ramsdell’s big bag was one of four 30-pound-plus stringers on the day.

Falcon Lake is a really deep, clear lake known for producing huge largemouth bass. Some people actually refer to it as a “canyon reservoir.”

Believe it or not, the bass at Falcon Lake are actually spawning.

That’s hard to imagine, considering the thick layer of frost that was on my windshield this morning. But I guess it’s a little warmer in Texas than it is here in the Mid-South.

We only have one local anglers in the tournament - Robert Kenyon of Cordova. He caught five bass that weighed 12-1 Wednesday and will begin Thursday’s second round in 132nd place.

You can get complete results on the FLW Outdoors web site.

Doesn’t look like this is going to be a very good crowd here tonight, which is kind of surprising since the Tigers drew well last Thursday against Siena.

Though I still maintain that Memphis will lose a Conference USA game this year, I just can’t imagine it would be tonight. East Carolina would have to have an unbelievable shooting night to make it happen, and the Tigers would have to sleepwalk. Memphis kind of did for a half last year against these guys, and the result was a 21-21 tie at halftime. The biggest thing that stood out about that game was that East Carolina stayed in a 2-3 zone the whole time, and the Tigers got suckered into taking too many 3-pointers. Memphis shot the ball poorly that night, but East Carolina’s offense last year was really, really poor. Mack McCarthy has the team playing better now, and he probably deserves to keep that job. McCarthy, by the way, said this week he has no idea how it will play out after the season and if he’ll be retained by ECU on a permanent basis. East Carolina signed one player, but McCarthy admitted that they’ve held off on signing a couple other guys early because of the coaching uncertainty.

Meanwhile, I should pass along this video Chris Douglas-Roberts did with CSTV where he taught the cross-over dribbl ehe’s so good at.

According to most the Tigers have now won 40 consecutive home games and go for 41 tonight against East Carolina. So I thought it was as good a time as any to look back at some quirky little facts about the streak.

The truth is the streak is actually at 43 games. The Tigers have played 3 exhibitions in that time frame. They took down CBU and Lemoyne Owen in the process which did not count towards the streak. That makes no sense to me but hey what do I know.
Read the rest of this entry »