Now is a great time to fish Terminator’s new Weedless Football Jig.

That’s what 2011 Bassmaster Elite Series Rookie of the Year Ott DeFoe will have tied on throughout the dog days of summer.

“And I’m not doing that to catch pound-and-a-half fish either, I’m doing it to try to catch three- to five-pounders, or even bigger fish,” says the Terminator and Rapala bass pro. He debuted the new jig in July at ICAST, the sport-fishing industry’s largest trade show.

“The hook, the head shape, the way it’s all laid out, it’s perfect,” DeFoe says. “It’s got a flat spot on the front, which will make it stand up on the bottom and give it great action in the water when you’re dragging it.”

And that’s how DeFoe primarily fishes it - dragging it slowly along deep bottom structure to imitate crayfish and bottom-hugging bluegills.

“There’s two things you’re going to imitate with a football jig, and the obvious choice is a crawdad,” he explains. “The one that’s a little bit less obvious that a lot of people don’t think of with a football jig is a bluegill.”

The new football jigs’ full, custom silicone skirts feature colors that perfectly match that hatch.

“In a more crawdad-type situation, the Green Pumpkin-Orange is my all-time favorite,” DeFoe says. “I’ve never seen a crawdad that didn’t have orange in it.”

Black-and-blue skirt colors best imitate bluegills, he says, but Green Pumpkin-Orange patterns are good in certain situations too. “That can be a crawdad or a bluegill, either one,” Defoe says.

Available in six different skirt colors, DeFoe’s new go-to football jig is an update of a previous Terminator jig. Updates are a skirt-color-matched multi-fiber weed guard, a new head design, and a new custom Wide Gap VMC® hook.

“It’s got a beefy hook in it, which is what I like for football jig fishing,” DeFoe says. It comes in three sizes: 1/2 oz, 3/4 oz. and 1 oz. “Those are the primary sizes for deep jig fishing for me.”

“I’m really excited about it,” he says. “It does what a football jig’s supposed to do, and it does it really well.”

Where Ott fishes it
The new Terminator Weedless Football Jig performs equally well in vegetation and brush as it does in and around open-water rocks.

“A football jig for scattered brush is definitely good, typically later in the summer, where you find brush on points and the sides of ledges,” DeFoe says. “But for me, football jig fishing is primarily about rock.”

When DeFoe ties on his Terminator football jigs this summer, he will use his sonar unit to locate fish on deep-rock transition areas.

“The things you look for are changes within the rock - whether it be where it goes from gravel to bigger chunk rock, or if it’s just an isolated couple of big rocks together,” he explains. “It could not even be the size, but the color. Where I live in Tennessee, there’s some rock that’s red and some rock that’s white. And at times, on those transitions, just the different colors of rock is where those fish will be.”

How Ott fishes it
Although DeFoe will sometimes hop or “stroke” a football jig, he most often drags them. His method is similar to Carolina Rig fishing, he says.

“I’ll just throw it out and let it go to the bottom and then I’ll reel up my slack and just pull it to the side, because I want to keep it on the bottom,” he explains. “And I always move it with the rod tip, never with the reel handle.

“I’ll kind of do it as a steady process,” he explains further. “I’ll drag it, wind up the slack, drag it again. I really don’t do much for pausing in between the two.”

What Ott uses to fish it
DeFoe fishes his Terminator football head jigs with a 7-foot, medium-heavy baitcasting rod with an extra-fast tip. He pairs it with a fast reel - a 7:1 or 7:9. He fills most of his spool with 50-pound braid, but ties to the end of that a 15-pound fluorocarbon leader.

“That allows me to go with a little bit lighter-action rod,” he explains, acknowledging that his set-up is “probably a little bit different” than other bass pros. “You feel everything that way,” he says. “You know everything that’s going on, you feel every little tick.

DeFoe says his set-up prevents hooked fish from coming unbuttoned.

“When you set the hook, sometimes those fish will really start running at the boat,” he explains. “So a fast reel helps you pick up line faster and catch up to them.

“You may just feel a little bitty tick and then your line just kind of goes limp because the fish is actually swimming at you,” he says. “That happens a lot. So you notice that ‘no weight’ sensation a lot quicker this way.

DeFoe’s set-up does not require Olympic-effort hooksets either.

“Once you feel him, you reel down tight and lean back and you’ve got him,” he explains. “It doesn’t matter if it’s at the end of the cast in 30 feet deep, or right beside the boat in 10 feet deep. Your hookset is always basically the same.”

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