The 2024 Bass Lure Bracket

With March Madness in full swing, we know you’re dying to fill out another bracket. So why not one on the best bass lures? When you think about it, a sort of mini tournament starts every time you open your tackle box, with all the baits inside vying for a spot at the end of your line—and a chance to land the trophy. Picking a winner usually comes down to single-elimination, head-to-head matchups, too: Senko or chatterbait? Chatterbait.

What’s missing is the actual bracket, so we’ve provided it below—and you’re not just picking the best lure for a day; you are crowning the best bass lure of all time. To that end, we asked our resident bass expert and tournament angler Shaye Baker to seed 32 bass lures in the following four categories:

Skirted Baits: As the name implies, skirted baits are lures that feature a skirt to conceal the hook and give the bait a more realistic profile. For the purposes of this bracket, we’ve excluded jigs that use hair for skirts (more on those below), instead focusing on baits with skirts made of rubber, silicone, or similar material. Popular examples are flipping-and-pitching jigs, spinnerbaits, buzzbaits, and chatterbaits.

Hard Baits: The term “hard bait” refers to bass fishing lures that are, you guessed it, hard. They are typically made of solid plastic and use metal components like split rings, hook hangers, and treble hooks. We’ll also lump in baits made of balsa wood and any other hard material that isn’t all-metal, as with spoons. You know the usual hard-bait suspects: crankbaits, Spooks, poppers, and hard jerkbaits, to name a few. 

Soft Plastics: This section of the bracket includes the all-time greats when it comes to soft-plastic baits. Rubbery artificial lures like worms, Senkos, Flukes, and toads all have a couple things in common: they’re made from some sort of soft-plastic material, and each requires some sort of terminal tackle to ready it for the water. By pairing many of these baits with the appropriate hooks and weights, you can create some of the most popular and effective rigs for bass fishing, including Texas rigs, Carolina rigs, Ned rigs, drop shots, and more.  

Wild Card: Some bass lures defy easy labels, and for these outliers, we have our Wild Card category. Frog baits can be hard or soft, for example, and glidebaits are things all their own. Don’t underestimate this catch-all category, though, because it encompasses some all-time favorites, like the most famous wake bait of all, the Jitterbug. Jigging spoons, hair jigs, and spybaits are other examples of wild card baits. 

Each round of voting (there will be five total) will last two days. The winning lure will be announced on Friday, March 29. One thing to note—and this is important: After you’ve made your selections in the head-to-head matchups below, you must hit the SUBMIT button at the the bottom if you want your votes to count. With that said, have at it.

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