Dustin Connell Wins 2025 Bass Pro Shops REDCREST Presented by Miller Tech

Dustin Connell goes back-to-back, claims third championship title on Lake Guntersville with 87-11

Dustin Connell captured his third REDCREST title with 87 pounds, 11 ounces on 27 Lake Guntersville bass. Photo by Phoenix Moore.

Mitchell Forde

BASS PRO TOUR Press Release

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The 2025 iteration of Bass Pro Shops REDCREST Presented by MillerTech on Lake Guntersville marked the third time Major League Fishing’s championship event has been held in the bass-fishing mecca of Alabama.

For the third time, Dustin Connell is keeping the trophy in his home state.

Connell ran away from the field on Championship Sunday, both figuratively and literally. After making a roughly 70-mile trek away from the history- and largemouth-rich waters of lower Lake Guntersville to the tailrace below the Nickajack Dam, Connell stacked up 87 pounds, 11 ounces on 27 scorable bass. The best single-day total of any angler at the event (despite a 65-minute delay due to weather), that was enough to hold off a late charge from Wesley Strader by 8-5.

Connell earned $300,000 for the win and further cemented himself as the best big-event performer going. The only angler to win REDCREST multiple times, he’s claimed the title in back-to-back years and three times total – he previously won on Lake Eufaula in 2021 and Lay Lake in 2024. He’s now just the third angler ever with three tour championship titles. Only Bass Fishing Hall of Famers Kevin VanDam and Rick Clunn have won more with four apiece.

This also marked his seventh total win on the Bass Pro Tour. Shortly after it became official, an emotional Connell said that, in some ways, it’s the most special one yet.

“I think just me winning the tournament doing my own deal, winning it with my style of fishing that I love, and then coming off of a couple tough tournaments and just a lot of adversity, I was very, very, very shook up,” Connell said.

Here’s how the Top 10 anglers who qualified for the Championship Round finished:

1. Dustin Connell — 87-11 (27)
2. Wesley Strader — 79-6 (29)
3. Zack Birge — 44-12 (17)
4. Paul Marks Jr. — 43-5 (15)
5. Jake Lawrence — 38-10 (15)
6. Chris Lane — 38-10 (16)
7. Brent Ehrler — 37-12 (14)
8. David Dudley — 33-8 (10)
9. Ron Nelson — 15-2 (6)
10. Bobby Lane — 8-5 (3)

 

Ironically, to keep his REDCREST track record perfect in his home state, Connell ventured all the way to Tennessee. Connell grew up fishing current on the Coosa River, and he said he’s been thinking for months about venturing to the Nickajack Dam so he could fish in his comfort zone.

That flew in the face of conventional Guntersville wisdom, which Connell admits gave him pause.

“I had this in my mind literally six months ago,” he said. “I was like, ‘I want to go up that river, I want to go up that river.’ But Guntersville is such a badass lake, and on the way, I just didn’t think that I could compete up there. I was like, ‘I feel dumb even going up here.’”

So, Connell started Day 1 trying to target spawning largemouth at the lower end of the fishery. Pre-tournament chatter suggested that would be the dominant pattern, but Connell caught just one scorable bass during the opening period of the event. He ran to Nickajack in Period 2, but strong winds made for a long trip. He only added one more fish during that period, and at the end of it, he sat in 47^th place out of 50 anglers.

“I just wasn’t catching them,” Connell said. “The wind was blowing again, and there was pollen everywhere. It just was not the deal.

“I get to the dam, and I caught 20-something pounds at the dam late in the day. So, I said, ‘screw this; I’m fishing the whole tournament up there, good, bad or ugly.’”

Connell, who caught all three species of bass (largemouth, smallmouth and spotted) in the tailrace, steadily climbed SCORETRACKER® throughout Day 2. Still, he needed a last-minute flurry to earn a spot in the Top 20 and advance to the Knockout Round. He caught four bass totaling 12-6 in the last 13 minutes before lines out to jump from the wrong side of the elimination line into 17th.

Connell attributed that rally to a bait change. After spending most of the day throwing a 2.5-inch CrushCity The Mayor swimbait, he switched to a CrushCity Mooch Minnow. Even without the aid of forward-facing sonar (he didn’t catch a bass all week that he first saw on his screen), he was able to shake it in the current breaks along the dam’s concrete walls and trigger bites.

“The sun was out, and they kind of quit biting,” Connell said. “I was initially catching them on a Mayor, and I was winding it down the walls. … Well, late in the day, I picked that rod up with a Mooch Minnow on there. And I made like three casts with it, and I caught two back-to-back. And I figured out the bait that they were really wanting, and the action of it.”

 

 

It’s not just the REDCREST champion that will be familiar to MLF fans but the baits that won him the trophy. While Connell said he caught a few fish on both a CrushCity Janitor worm and a Rapala Mavrik jerkbait, the two tools that did most of his damage were a Mooch Minnow and a CrushCity Freeloader – the same baits he used most often in his win on Lay Lake last year. He rigged the Freeloader on a scrounger head and threw it on baitcast gear with 17-pound Seaguar Invizx fluorocarbon. He affixed the Mooch Minnow to a 3/16-ounce VMC Redline tungsten jighead.

The perfect storm on Championship Sunday

Even after his strong finish to the Qualifying Round, Connell wasn’t sure he’d found the winning pattern. However, during Saturday’s Knockout Round, he noticed how well the bass were biting during early-morning, low-light conditions. Knowing the forecast for Sunday called for storms all day, he started to get excited.

“Yesterday morning, I was like, ‘dude, this tournament just got real interesting,’” he said. “I was like, ‘there is a chance this could go down.’” 

Thunderstorms delayed takeoff, giving Connell less time to catch up after his long run, and made for a rough ride. But once he arrived, it didn’t take long to see that his hopes were well-founded. The storms both ignited a feeding frenzy below the dam and killed the sight-fishing pattern much of the Top 10 had relied on to get to the Championship Round.

Connell arrived at his starting spot around 9:35 a.m., 45 minutes after lines in. On his second cast, he landed his first scorable bass. By 9:50, he’d caught three more and brought his total to 14-15, taking a lead he would never relinquish. In all, Connell caught 31-0 in the span of 36 minutes before the period break.

While Connell consistently added to his total, Strader – who also made a long run up the river, albeit not all the way to the dam – stayed on his heels. It seemed like every time Connell had pulled away, Strader would cut his lead to 10 pounds or so. Connell didn’t catch a scorable bass during the final 47 minutes before lines out, and Strader trimmed his deficit from more than 20 pounds at the start of Period 3 to less than 9. However, he could never quite get over the hump.

Connell called the final period “the most stressful period of bass fishing I’ve had in my life.”

“I know how big it is of an event, and I knew it was mine to lose,” he said. “I was like, ‘dude, if I could just add on a few more fish – don’t light it on fire, just catch some.’ And I did my job.”

Key for Connell was the caliber of fish he found during the Championship Round. Strader actually caught two more scorable bass on the day, but Connell boated six weighing 4 pounds or more, including three over 5. His average scorable bass weighed about 3.25 pounds compared to 2.72 for the rest of the field – more than half a pound per fish.

“I knew there were some big ones up there,” Connell said. “But I did not expect to catch the quality I caught today. I mean, it was unreal.”