cixelsyd

But DCA is not "focused exclusively on the unique needs of corps with younger members". They are an all-age circuit.

The DCI definition of "full tour" is met by joining the tour at San Antonio. As of 2012, Jersey Surf is no longer a "limited tour" corps.

Jersey Surf is not a weekend only program. But do not take my word for it - look at their appearances on tour: Thu 7/19 Round Rock, TX Sat 7/21 San Antonio, TX Tue 7/24 Ocean Springs, MS Wed 7/25 Hattiesburg, MS Sat 7/28 Atlanta, GA Tue 7/31 Salem, VA Wed 8/1 West Chester, PA Thu 8/2 Lawrence, MA Sat 8/4 Allentown, PA Thu 8/9 Prelims Fri 8/10 Semis

But they cannot do that if they follow your previous advice:

So you now admit that, contrary to your previous assertions, that the role of DCI should be more than just organizing events and selling media?

Is that your opinion, or is it what you are hearing from the G7 directors themselves? Then all hope is lost. Correction - grow the business, not the activity.

But it sounds like these judges would have given the same results under a subjective system like today.

Sorry, but when someone pays $100 and gets $15 worth of stuff in exchange, the other $85 qualifies as "contributions" in my book.

Why? What happens in 8 months?

I agree. Except that if we did away with the current preliminary format, we would separate the greats from the also-rans in advance, denying them the chance to compete. You are mistaken. The whole principle of the Premier League was to make the top tier smaller. English clubs had lost ground to their European rivals because most European top-tier leagues had 20 teams, while England had 24. As a result, the top English clubs had eight additional matches on their schedules, plus the usual dividing-the-pie-into-smaller-pieces. Formation of the Premier League permitted them to ramp the number of clubs down to 20, divide the pie among fewer clubs, and not long after, regain their competitiveness with the rest of Europe. This sort of situation might have been useful to refer to back when top DCM corps were pushing for a pay raise. There, you had an analogous higher level of competition. For DCI, the only analogous feature is how the pie is sliced.

The multi-billion dollar company cares. And evidently, they must think others will care, or they would not pay to have their logo all over DCI in the first place.

If the 30,000 seat venue costs more, the former would be preferable. But I agree with your premise that it is better to have more fans. I would rather have DCI net $2 million profit from 2 million fans at $1 profit each, vs. 2,000 fans at $1,000 profit per fan.

No, it is not. This is one of the things I have learned from discussions with supporters of top corps. The voting members of DCI, historically 13-25 of the top corps in the activity, decide on rule and policy changes. Some of these changes affect corps operating costs. These voting directors, as I am told, would not be voting in favor of changes that increase costs if they are not prepared to cover those costs. Either they think the change will cause a proportional rise in revenue, or they are willing and able to increase their own funding to cover the cost. Either way, it is not incumbent upon DCI to do anything different. I have yet to see a rule change proposal where the "financial impact" section mandates DCI raise unrelated revenue to cover the cost of the proposed change.

Not necessary to identify a problem? You suggest hiring a high-priced manager to take control of DCI away from the corps and fundamentally transform it, without even identifying a problem that justifies such a radical move? And these questions - give me a break. "Are we as successful as we can be?" Anyone who answers "yes" to that talks himself out of a job. You want someone on your team who presumes they cannot improve? Neither do I.

And if PC had the same split on their reports, their numbers would be lower too. We can only compare apples to apples. (The funny thing is, even if we accepted your premise, Crown would still be spending $300,000 more than Crest.) I am sorry, but the numbers do not lie. Top corps spend more. No, but there is a strong correlation, and plenty of logic to suggest that money well spent makes a difference. What is this - National Twist-My-Words Day? Show me where in my posts it says that I "despise everyone at the top of the field". I have given plenty of positive suggestions on this board. If you were sincerely interested, you would look them up. But I doubt that you are sincerely interested. From your first post, your mind has been made up. You did not come here to discuss with an open mind, and perhaps learn something in the process - you came here to present your point of view, which is remarkably similar to that of the G7. I see no point in repeating my suggestions just for you, so that you can poke holes in them. (Of course, if you hang around long enough, you will get your chance.) Anyway, I am still interested in hearing what DCI does that you call "mission creep". For that matter, I would like to know a few other things: - How is the DCI marketing message blurred? Open classs gets one 2-minute video from the Janual, and some news from the tour two weeks out of the year. The rest of the DCI marketing message is world class. Are major corporate sponsors really balking at that sixth decimal place because of that? - What is different about your 18-corps premier league and 22-corps minor league vs. the current 22-corps WC and 18-corps OC? To me, it still seems that the only difference is the numbers. Dividing the pie into fewer slices, so that each slice is a little bigger. Am I missing something? - Or is it that all these extraneous stereotypes about small corps/young corps/community corps are attempted justification for the above? Since those stereotypes are inaccurate, they only really serve to distract from your actual idea to set the top division based on competitive placement. But again, if I am confused on that, set me straight.

No - another organization that runs a marching music circuit brought in more charitable support than DCI. And of course, that one piece of data is the outlier, owed to that Chase donation. I give YEA! credit, as they certainly worked to drum up votes to maximize their Chase ranking. But I would not dismiss DCI as not having any kind of support base of their own.

Crown had $1,588,600 in expenses in 2011, and placed 4th. Pacific Crest had $679,854 in expenses in 2011, and placed 18th. I think that does disprove your point.

Cavaliers, Cadets and Crown all had much higher expenses. Phantom Regiment was in between.

Just because I mentioned the word "slotting" does not mean that I therefore think judges are being purposely dishonest. Again, I said that in my opinion (remember, subjective judging is just another set of opinions), judges sometimes fail to fully respond to performance variations. No one is perfect. I presume that my own opinions are not so bad, given that they agree with the judges so often. It is interesting to note the character of those incidences when we do not agree. In DCI world class, whenever I disagree with a judging result, it seems to me that they err in the direction of consistency with past results. In marching band contests, other drum corps circuits, or even DCI open class, those differences of opinion are evenly split in either direction.

Well, we know why that is! Any entity that allows itself to be bullied into boiling their purpose and position down to a single, actionable sentence is an entity that has lost their way. Unless it is one doozy of a run-on sentence.

I honestly do not know how to help you, then. Do you expect there to be no overlap between divisions? There is no mechanism to prevent that possibility. For example, if the Kansas City Royals are as bad as people say, maybe the most exceptional minor league teams can already beat them. We have no way of knowing, though, if they do not play each other. Is major league baseball dishonest in their marketing, then? And if so, what do we do? How do we prevent minor league teams from becoming good enough to beat the lowest major league team? (And should we?) Maybe this is why you like that promotion/relegation model of European soccer leagues. Of course, that model is an admission that there is overlap, and that overlapping teams should therefore be moved up/down on a regular basis. Or maybe not - wait. What are you suggesting for applying this to drum corps? - a multi-division prelim contest like 2011-2012, with the top 16-18 becoming the WC for next season? Or: - separate divisions, where the top three lower-division corps advance every year to replace the bottom three top-division units? Just a few days ago, you said 40% was the appropriate number. Why should it now be 50% instead? - that is hogwash. Friends of DCI, volunteers, grants - DCI has had plenty of charitable support. Of course, given the G7 demands for cost cutting and attempts to fire staff, I would expect pursuit of charitable income to be the first effort to fall by the wayside. It would be disingenuous to point to something DCI cut at the urging of the corps, and then say "look, the corps do more of this than DCI, therefore DCI sucks!". Not sure I understand you. DCI has a long list of corporate sponsors, and some are pretty big companies. Maybe if you gave an example of the kind of big sponsor a corps is hooking that DCI cannot attract, that would make it more clear. DCI can return services to the corps as well as money. Honestly, that is what DCI was created for - to do the grunt work of organizing events, organizing a judging system and pool of judges, recording audio and video, licensing, and so forth. What specifically does DCI do that you consider "mission creep"? No. Honestly, corps can spend as much as they are willing and able to raise. When they start making a public outcry that their financial model is broken, though, it is reasonable to ask if the problem might be too much increased costs. What? The 990 thread I read, IIRC, showed that several of our top corps are spending noticeably more. Then why bring it up?

If you are going to distort my words that grotesquely, there is little point discussing any further. My statements were not mutually exclusive. I only said that slotting can cause less diverse results, not that it is. But since you want your "gotcha!" moment - yes, there are times when (in my opinion) judges fail to fully respond to differences in performance quality on a given day. That is not because they "cheat" - I have no reason to believe they are not making a sincere effort to give accurate results.

Then you should read my first paragraph.

Okay, so the sheets are more performer driven. Has the judging actually reflected that, or not, in your opinion?

No. I agree that drum corps competition will probably never yield equally diverse winners as major league sports. But the reasons for that are the nature of the activity (less parity to begin with) and the vicious circle of more money - more wins - more money magnifying that disparity. Subjective judging does not cause less diverse winners, in my opinion. Failure of judges to do their job (i.e. slotting), however, can cause that.