Posted Dec 2024

The Football Head Silicone Jig

Over the last 20 years of my fishing career, there is one lure that I’ve come to trust in the late-winter and early-spring and that is the football jig. While technology has brought about many new minnow-pinging options with forward-facing sonar strategies, there are still tried and true traditional methods that can prove to produce some of the biggest late-winter and early-spring bass. It’s like watching high-level college or pro football, where the flashiest teams tend to have high powered passing offenses but the teams that win championships typically have the best offensive lines with the best run offense to control the game. When the fishery I’m visiting sets up for this strategy, I always like to run the football down the middle to catch big bass in the first quarter of the year.

While sunny days and warm fronts can push bass shallow temporarily, it’s the deepest water in the fishery tends to be the most stable and dependable. When I’m fishing or practicing for a tournament, I’m always looking for the most dependable pattern that I can count on and lean on to produce. When I say “run the football down the middle,” I’m referring to fishing out in the middle of the back of a tributary and running my football jig across the bottom in high percentage areas. I like to look for the last deep water in creeks and look for wood that is laying on the bottom. Sometimes, debris and logs will collect that are washed in from heavy spring rains and be laying on the bottom in those areas. I utilize side image technology and spend a lot of time idling in the back of the creeks looking for wood laying on the bottom. How deep? It depends on the fishery and often the clearer the water the more this pattern can become a dominant pattern to tap into, as bass will tend to utilize the bottom wood as cover and an ambush point. I’ve caught fish as deep as 40-50 feet with this technique.

I’m very particular about 2 things to make this method a guaranteed success, and that is the setup and the jig. This technique calls for a specific set up to maximize efficiency that allows you to feel the strike, set the hook, and get those deep fish into the boat. I prefer a 7’6” custom graphite blank made by Elite Rods (model 7682f). This rod is extremely light for a 7’6” rod, which allows me to make extremely long casts. It’s also an extremely sensitive rod that, when paired with 12# Vicious Pro-Elite Fluorocarbon, allows me to feel the bottom composition while I’m dragging the jig on the bottom searching for wood and trash to know when I’m in the strike zone. I don’t want to hop it up off of the bottom too much this time of year. Rather, I want to crawl it on the bottom slowly especially once I’m in the high percentage strike zone where bass are most likely to inhabit. Once I feel my jig starting to catch on objects on the bottom, I tend to let it sit and will even shake it on semi-slack line to make the living rubber flare and the craw pinchers on the trailer stand up. A spring crawdad is an easy meal and hard for a big bass to pass up! If there is a bass close by, that will get its attention and trigger the bite.

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The football jig that I use makes all the difference during this cold-water period, and I’ve seen it outperform other jigs in my boat with 5 bites to 1. I use a custom football jig made by Yank-Um Custom Tackle that is hand-tied by legendary lure-designer, Wally Kilpatrick. This jig has been made in East Tennessee for over 30 years and is one of the go-to staples for many high-level anglers around the country. For water deeper than 15 feet, I choose the 3/4 oz. version and for water shallower than 15 feet, I choose the 1/2 oz. version. I stick with traditional crawdad patterns and varieties of green pumpkin and watermelon almost exclusively. 90% of the time, I’m using the color called “Money” because it has literally won me more of it than any other jig color I’ve ever used. It’s a green pumpkin hue with blue and orange accents, which looks like those early spring crawdads that big bass cannot pass up. I tend to use smaller profile trailers that have little to no action, like an Allusive Baits Brush Bug. Sometimes, less is more when it comes to action in the late-winter and early-spring. Keep it simple and run the football jig down the middle this spring for big bass! 

~ Todd Hollowell, Pro Angler