They spawn in the Spring. Period (Texas). My response to this topic is this: Hell No!

Some will spawn a month or two early and/or in the  spring. But only once. Definitely not in August-November. Last years winter crappie run up the creeks, was terrible due to low water and they couldn’t get in. The year before that, I was up a creek in January hitting spawning beds, actually sight casting to them if y’all remember, but this has a warm water discharge triggering them into spawning. But this topic come ups every year, just like the jet skis and wake boarders having no respect.
Again, you absolutely, won’t, see them on any bed till next year. They will go shallow to feed on shad in the fall. But like said before, it’s 2-3 weeks of that shallow stuff and you just get lucky to catch them there. I might miss them myself, you just never know. There is no special temp for that. It’s the shads decision on where the crappie decide to go.
My boat landed 41 keeper crappie and I cleaned all of them this afternoon. Egg sacks from an inch long all the way to looking like they were going to pop them out next month. But they have to develop first. It take some time and the sack stops growing but the eggs start to mature, slowly.
The fry would die if they hatched in October. They would freeze in a month and there is not an abundance of edible plankton for them to eat. In the spring, everything from bugs, worms, minnows, algae, plants, and fish – are spawning and the babies from other animals and plants are what we call zoo-plankton.
Zoo-plankton are organisms that have animal-like traits. The biggest are only five millimetres long and the smallest are just one thousandth of this size. They float, drift or weakly swim in the water and this is what the crappie will need to grow. They would not have enough food in the winter time, due to not much reproduces in the winter months and the sunlight is shorter than it is in the summer.

And…… Crappie spawn once a year.