With his win last week at Santee Cooper, his second Elite Series win of the year, and fifth overall – on five different fisheries in four different states – Brandon Palaniuk may have established himself as the greatest closer in the modern era of fishing. If he’s leading headed into the last day, by any amount, it’s a straight vertical climb to beat him, and if you’re ahead of him by a small margin you’d better watch out for that final day comeback.

It’s not that he can’t be beaten. After all, he has runner-up finishes and two third-place finishes in Elite Series competition, plus a second place in a Classic. Rather, it’s the fact that he seems to get better as events go on. In their primes, both KVD and Iaconelli both talked about using tournaments for practice, fishing where the bass were headed rather than where they were located, and that’s what made them so deadly. That’s the type of performance we saw at Santee, made all the more dramatic by the fact that he rebounded from a subpar Day Three with a massive bag on Sunday.

Hell, in two of his wins he’s lost poundage due to penalties and still come out on top. It’s like giving the rest of the field a handicap, fishing’s version of “I’ll tie one hand behind my back.” Those mental gaffes notwithstanding, when Palaniuk gets on a roll, it can be as thrilling as anything KVD, Clunn or Jordan Lee ever accomplished.

And he’s not quite 33.

To make something of an apples-and-oranges comparison, at 33 KVD was almost a year shy of his first Classic win, owned three AOY titles (to Palaniuk’s two) and had six B.A.S.S. wins (both tour and invitational level). Jordan Lee and Rick Clunn had both won a pair of Classics by the time they were Palaniuk’s current age. It’s not where you start, but where you finish, and the kid from Idaho just keeps getting stronger. There’s no guarantee that he’ll ever catch another bass, or win another tournament, ever again, but you’d be a fool to bet against him.

In this case, BP doesn’t stand for “batting practice.” It more likely refers to the fact that if you don’t put him away early, you’re likely to “be passed.”