It's been a banner year for big bucks in Ohio, and hunter Brandon Sweets is the latest to turn heads with a 20-point buck taken in the central part of the state earlier this month. Sweets hunted the behemoth for three years, he tells F&S, before finally putting an arrow in it on November 9 as it crashed through the timber trailing a doe.
Sweets' says his first in-person encounter with the buck took place in 2022. "I was sitting in a blind toward the end of bow season watching a couple of bucks spar in a field when he came in from some tall grass and scared them away,” he recalls. “He was probably a 150-class deer that year."
Sweets hunts private property in Pickwick County, Ohio where he was born and raised. "I didn't see him again until the 2023 season when I had him and another nice buck squaring off next to my mock scrape about 70 yards away," says Sweets. "Just as he turned to start moving toward my stand, a group of poachers on four-wheelers drove through, and both bucks took off running.”
Sweets, 30, thinks the buck’s rack would have scored roughly 170 inches in 2023. “He only showed up on camera a couple times that year,” he says. “I saw him in person one other time while he was chasing a doe about 120 yards away. I kept hunting him, but I couldn’t pinpoint him. He was super smart and elusive.”
Fast forward to October 2024, and the buck was showing up on Sweets’ trail camera once again. “I’ve never seen a buck with so much mass in my life,” he says. “He’s the kind of deer you daydream about.”
He had his first in-person encounter of the season on the evening of November 8. “It was about 5:30, and it was just getting too dark to shoot,” he says. “I was ready to pack up, and I heard something coming through the woods that sounded like a freaking bear. He came within about 60 yards of my tree, but it was too dark. I couldn’t do anything.”
Sweets was back in his climber the following afternoon. This time, he set up closer to the buck’s core bedding area. “I had a 140-inch 9 pointer in front of me for about an hour on some hot does. I heard some rustling to the right of me and saw what I thought was a giant rack of horns coming up the creek bed,” he says. “I was like: There's no way those were antlers. And all of a sudden, every deer in the woods just exploded—everything started running.”
Sweets thought the spooked deer might have winded him, then he saw the buck’s rack moving toward his stand. “A doe ran right past me, and he trotted in behind her,” he says. “When he stopped and quartered away, about 25 yards from my tree, I stood up and took the shot.”
He heard a loud crack and the buck crashed into a thicket. Peering through his binos from about 55 yards away, Sweets could see the outline of the deer’s rack through the brush. “His antlers looked so big through the binoculars that I thought my mind was playing tricks on me,” he says. “Once I knew he was dead, I climbed out the tree so fast. When I got over to him, I just started pacing back and forth. I couldn’t believe it was finally over, and that it all came together so perfectly.”
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Sweets credits his brother Ryan with helping him locate and scout the once-in-a-lifetime buck, which his two daughters named “Big John” back in 2022. He plans to have it scored by Toby Hughes of Ohio Buckmasters later this week and expects the rack to measure more than 200 inches.
