Good call Roundball, silvers are notorious for this. Hatchery steelhead also sometimes do the "silver twist" and tangle their gillplates closed which takes the fight out of them. A previously caught fish is a definite possibility as well. Water temperature is also a factor. I ran into a similarly strange situation a few years ago, flyfishing the Sauk during the C&R season. On three separate occasions, I hooked and landed large CHROME fish, that hardly put up a struggle at all. They weren't hooked within a few hours before me, because I was fishing the run at least that long, and didn't see any boats, or other bank fishermen. Unless they were hooked downstream, and then moved up to where I was. My buddy and I thought of all kinds of possible reason why they didn't fight very well, but in the end we decided "Who really knows."