Slingerland
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Posts posted by Slingerland
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Does, changing locations and your name absolve an organization of that responsibility?
IE: The Troopers of Salt Lake City, UT
No. As long as an organization exists, they have to keep filing, even if they change mailing addresses. You would have to dissolve the corporation before you can escape the filing requirement.
I found a reply on the 990s thread that addresses the question of Spirit's 990s being missing from Guidestar. If the information is correct, it's sort of curious as to why no one at DCI would have caught it and made some noise (and IF that's the case...it wouldn't reflect well on DCI's attention to detail when it comes to these sorts of issues; you've got to be consistent, if you want to be perceived as fair and professional).
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Ok, last post on this, then I'm done.
Troopers didn't have an issue with debt; they had an issue with not filing a federally mandated form with the Internal Revenue Service. This was a situation that didn't happen once or twice, it happened repeatedly over a period of several years. Is it possible that their corps director at the time didn't know that it was supposed to be filed? Possibly, but my guess is that more likely that no one on their Board was checking to make sure it was filed. Several people dropped the ball over a period of years, and it finally led to a crisis.
It was a legal compliance issue, not a 'debt' issue.
First you claimed no knowledge of this fact, saying that it was a lie and an attempt to scandalize (when it's been pointed out to you that it's accurate), and then you tried to fight a losing semantics battle on it.
In the meantime, you've never acknowledged the very point that both Mr Boo and I have made; that DCI taking action in fall of 2005 led to a series of actions on Troopers part that helped them not just fix their problems, but emerge stronger than they were. It's not clear why you're determined to make this a negative discussion about past mistakes, when the rest of us are looking at a story about the positive effects of organizational change.
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And I disagree with your underlying premise that to prosper as a business DCI has to be an organization which just provides services for the 'top 16' or so drum corps in the world (whatever that means).
You disagree with a premise that was never stated. There's your first problem.
I said "all" drum corps; I'm not sure how much less equivocal one can be than using the word "all" to indicate how they believe the benefits should be disbursed, since using "all" necessarily takes away the idea that it could mean "some." IF the path forward means pushing the names and images of the top-ranked corps even harder to the public, but the net result is an increase of interest and dollars that make it possible for DCI to have another $2 million a year to payout to the corps that appear in their shows (at every level), you take that deal; even if your corps isn't one of them that will be given as much airtime. Take the extra money, and use it to improve your own product, so that you can keep moving up the competitive ladder.
It seems that G7-derangement syndrome has taken over here. If one suggests that DCI is in need of a revamp, they are automatically "the enemy," and pointing out simple facts (that Pioneer sometimes loses to Open Class corps, or that the Troopers were once removed as DCI members) is tantamount to 'beating up" on those organizations. I have no great love for any of the G7 organizations, and no animosity for anyone NOT in the G7; I just hate to see any business operating at less than peak capacity.
To my mind, the best way for DCI to grow the overall revenues would be to clarify their competitive model to make it more like other competitive organizations that have a wide range of talent involved in the competitions. If you have an alternative suggestion that would help DCI add excitement and grow the overall revenues available to pass on to the corps, one that would stick with the current model (where alignment by proficiency is discouraged), then by all means, please present it. But the current model isn't really doing much to move the activity forward, financially. A change is going to be needed in order for that to happen.
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...even though that choice was still made available to then for the 2006 season had they chosen too.
Where's the information from DCI or the Troopers own Board minutes that supports this notion? Because they weren't officially reinstated by DCI until after the 2006 season - one year after their membership was taken away, and they needed that before they could honestly tell recruits that they were planning on hitting the field again.
Honestly I don't see the point of trying to make what was a terrible situation seem like it was actually sunnier than it was. Their former management and Board made a lot of mistakes (over a period of years). DCI finally stepped in and took an action that resulted in Troopers seeing the light. They made the changes needed to right the ship (wagon?) and get themselves back on a path of growth from a competitive and financial standpoint. It's a happy ending (in the old fashioned sense, before the 20-somethings bust my chops
), but there's no reason to try and soft-peddle the situation that brought the change about.-
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However, the current G7 and some other individuals want to turn DCI into a business of providing services to just support 'the best' competitive top elite corps who only desire to also support a select few 'best of the best' youth who are themselves financially privileged along with being talented and skilled enough to become a part of a select few elite corps.
Nothing that I've said or suggested supports that notion at all. My point was and is quite simple; in order for DCI to do a better job of providing money to the corps who appear in their shows, they'll need to increase their revenues significantly.
You say they provide "a service to youth", but the points of fact is that they don't. They provide services to organizations, those organizations are who provide the services to the youth. Their primary focus was and is and should be about coming up with ways to increase the overall audience for drum corps and the overall amount of money that is available to disburse to their member corps. I never said anything about supporting some corps and not others.
However that's ONE part of the equation; coming up with an understanding of WHAT they're supposed to do. I'd imagine everyone here would agree that when it comes down to it, the most important thing DCI could possibly do now is increase the amount of money coming in to their coffers and increase the size of the crowds in the stands, since live performances, rather than media sales, is what drives the economic engine.
But there's a second part of the equation, and that's HOW you do it.
My belief was and is that their best shot at increasing overall revenues will be to do a better job of showing the public just what can be accomplished on a football field, and doing that would necessarily involve showcasing the most proficient performers they have in the stable. Like it or not, that would include every corps in the hated G7 plus another 7 or 9 who weren't signatories on that dumb idea, but are still demonstrably more proficient (and hence, more impressive to a lay audience) than the corps that are typically scoring in the 60s or 70s rather than the 80s or 90s. Yes, there might be exceptions to the rules (Surf was more entertaining to most drum corps fans than some of the other corps in their range, but would that have struck as hard with a non drum corps audience? You'd need to test market it to find out).
Would that mean that there would be more attention put on the big names in DCI? Yes. Would doing so necessarily be a bad thing if the increased profile of the activity allowed for a new influx of money to the DCI organization, thus resulting in the capacity to make bigger payouts to every organization competing in their shows, regardless of which 'league' they were in? No, not at all, to my mind.
Your mileage, of course, may vary, but I don't see a viable path that includes a future in which every drum corps, regardless of their performance level, is pitched to the public as being equally skilled. That approach is viable for a youth athletic league with little kids, where they don't keep score because the score isn't important, but not for a multi-million consumer-based business like DCI. As someone else said, if you're going to say that you're the "major league" there's no shame in saying "and we have a minor league too."
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I'm thinking about Dan A's admission that DCI doesn't get involved in individual corps' finances, yet this clearly was a finance issue with the IRS. How can DCI be complicit if they intentionally stay out of corps' business?
The issue here really wouldn't be finance, it would be compliance. The 990 for a npo is only a financial filing, there's never an amount of tax due with it (since they're non-taxable companies), but there IS a substantial financial penalty for failure to file (up to $10,000 per year per violation).
I'm in communications, not regulations, but my guess is that any concern would lie in DCI's basic business model of being "an association" with members. It could have just been a case of better safe than sorry, but in dealing with the IRS, that's a smart position to take.
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The FACT of the matter is the " Troopers were not REMOVED from DCI field competition for a year by DCI as you stated above. They WITHDREW themselves from field competition for the year 2006.
The language of the DCI resolution is incontrovertible. While it didn't direct the Troopers to stop operations, it removed them as a corps that was eligible to compete in DCI contests until such a time as their membership was reinstated.
Regardless of their interim director's phrasing, the official DCI language pretty much settles the matter. Now, back to figuring out how you can increase DCI's revenues by 30 or 40%.
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If Slingerland and Boo are right about the circumstances of Troopers, I wonder why the same actions were not taken with Teal and Glassmen? Or Capital Regiment, for that matter.
Were those circumstances different?
Again, just going off a memory of a discussion with a friend working at one of the other member corps back then, the problem with Troopers was the compliance issue. The IRS, as you probably know (I'm guessing, from your other posts that you work in the accounting field?) can choose to be merciless when it comes to how and who they penalize for violations, and DCI felt that the best protection they had from being caught in the feds' net as a "co-conspirator" was to officially disassociate themselves with an organization who'd failed to file their annual 990s for an extended period of time.
As Mr Boo correctly notes, it ended up being a blessing for the organization, being the spark that helped them turn things around.
Re: Glassmen and Teal Sound, I'd hope that there be standards in place that would give DCI the ability to review the financial pictures of their member corps on a regular basis, in the interest of keeping everyone living within their means. But if they either didn't have a mechanism in place, or had one and chose not to use it, that would be a separate issue that should be addressed.
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They were encouraged to take a year off, get the new management in place to get their financial health in order, which they they subsequently did.
http://trib.com/news...ae6b8dcbbe.html
"Pursuant to the DCI By-laws the board of directors voted unanimously to terminate the membership of the Troopers from Casper, Wyo., due to internal and external compliance issues, spanning several years."
That's one hell of an "encouragement." While it didn't mean that they couldn't operate as a business, it disallowed them from participating in DCI shows.
There's no denigration involved here, just a simple statement of facts as they stood. The Troopers did the right thing and fixed the issue, but it involved some outside pressure. Their program was made better because of it. Is it possible that other corps whose management and programming teams aren't showing marked improvement over a span of time could also benefit from occasional reorganization?
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Trying to be very respectful here; really and truly I am. But... apparently you know absolutely nothing at all about the personal character of most of the youth who choose to audition for, and perform with, either Pioneer or the Colts. I guarantee you that your scenario of winning a lower division would not "have made their year'. Most of the youth who choose to belong to those particular corps are there for something way deeper, and way more important, than winning a chunk of metal! And because of that deeper reason, as long as the corps are financially stable and can take care of the youth, what real difference does it make to 'you', or any other person for that matter, if those corps are in World Class or Open Class?
And I'll try to be equally respectful.
What possible financial benefit is brought to the overall goal of increasing DCI's overall revenues and profile when the message of product is so clouded?
See, here's where I'm coming from. DCI is a business. Pure and simple. Their job is to sell tickets and recordings, and then give the money to the corps who perform at the shows. And right now, the amount of money they're able to deliver back to the corps is pathetically small, in many cases, less than 12 or 13% of those organizations' total expenses of production. Are there some efficiencies that could be enacted to improve the amount of cash they pay out? Probably, but the bigger issue is finding a way to increase the overall revenues, by working with the corps to create more sellable products and personae, and finding a way to sell the concept of drum corps to the types of corporate sponsors who should be salivating at the prospect of having themselves attached to the demographic and cultural elements that DCI's product naturally brings to the table.
But making that kind of upward movement will likely require DCI to find their most sellable aspects, and promote them even more aggressively. Make no no mistake; the goal is to increase the overall revenues so that there's more money available for everyone concerned, but doing so will require them to do a better job of aligning the corps into meaningful divisions/leagues, and being clear in the messaging connected with each of those leagues.
In terms of teenage kids not appreciating wins at their own levels, then we should contact every high school in America who offers both Varsity and Junior Varsity competiton, and let them know that they are doing the kids in their Junior Varsity teams a disservice by giving them their own leagues. Those kids who win contests at the JV level obviously must feel completely disregarded by their communities, that they were even allowed to to contest for races and games that were there just for them.
Get the personal passion out of the picture and look at it as a marketing and communications question. 28 drum corps, of widely disparate abilities, aren't really a "league" in any meaningful sense. An easier to understand model, with a premier league and a second league is both more honest with the fans and the kids in the corps themselves and easier to sell as a concept to outside sponsors.
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You cited above, quite clearly, that the Troopers ( your words ) " WERE REMOVED " from DCI competitions for a year. ...
From the DCW article:
"Following the decision by DCI's Board of Directors on September 23, terminating the membership of the Troopers Drum and Bugle Corps..."
DCI told them they couldn't compete anymore within the organization. Is there some more nuanced phrase you're looking for that makes being kicked out of DCI look like something less draconian than it was?
Your statement that Troopers decided not to compete is flat out inaccurate. They were given no choice in the matter. First you claimed no knowledge of the tax situation, and got into high dudgeon about that (despite the fact that you were given a link that clearly backed up the assertion), and then you go one further and claim that DCI never acted to force the issue, when the record clearly indicates that they did.
Be gracious, and acknowledge that your facts were off. It's good for the soul. And in the meantime, the point of bringing this up wasn't and isn't to dredge up past mistakes, but to point out that sometimes, being forced to make big changes is just the tonic needed to put an organization into a better place.
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I have an educated guess as to why this type of European Soccer League system has 'not' been implemented within DCI: Neither the Blue Devils organization nor the Santa Clara Vanguard organization desire to have two BD's and two SCV's within the financially cumbersome touring model of 'World Class'.
There could be some easy workarounds on that, not the least of which would be making sure that the premier league is limited to a reasonable number of teams (16 or 18, no more). Making it 16 would have the advantage of seeding the second league with some corps who are already draws on their own (Jersey Surf, Troopers, and Oregon Crusaders), which could help make their tours more profitable for the partners, and more profitable for their corps.
Looking at the quarterfinals scores from last summer, if the premier league cut off was 16, then BD would have won a title, and Colts would have won a title. For BD, that wouldn't make a difference, but for the members in Colts, it would have made their year not about competing in the middle of the pack, but competing at the top of their tier. Pioneer's members would have finished 10th in their league, rather than 27th. I guess I can't see how anyone would feel that giving the members a chance to get more immediate feedback about their efforts within a range of like-competitors would be a bad thing.
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but can we all agree that we need to find out if this claim of lawbreaking is accurate or not, and if found to be inaccurate, retract and apologize for leveling this charge on the part of a Corps for violating federal law and being removed from DCI competition for " a year " as one if its alleged penalties ?
It's accurate. I pride myself on actually knowing what the hell I'm talking about before I open my trap. There's no score listed for a 2006 Troopers, because they didn't field a corps that year. Look it up.
...DCI's major concern with the Troopers' financial behavior centered on failing to submit tax information in a timely manner for more than five years. Since 1996, the corps had not filed its Internal Revenue Service Forms 990. The forms are required of all 501©3 nonprofit corporations that receive more than $25,000 a year in revenue and are not religious organizations.http://trib.com/news...a746b01ef2.html
http://www.drumcorpsworld.com/?p=1542
The best thing that has happened to the Troopers was having DCI tell them they couldn't perform with the organization until they cleaned house and fixed their management problems. While that wasn't directly related to their field shows, it had the side benefit of bringing in a management team that cared about making their corps competitive again.
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Frankly,
There was a time when some people wanted both Pioneer and the TROOPERS to go to division II after being in Open ( World Class). Troopers didn't go to the lower class either..
I wasn't paying too much attention to drum corps in that period of time, but I do seem to recall that the Troopers, at the end of the period of time you cite, were removed from DCI competitions altogether for a year because of non-compliance with federal tax laws.
Clearly the organization was being poorly run on several different levels, and just as clearly, the Troopers organization today is not the same organization it was then. If anything, the example would seem to suggest that organizations who are failing to markedly step up their game over an extended period of time might be best served by forced re-organization, no?
I would tend to agree with the earlier posters (here or maybe in another thread) that the model that would work best would be the European soccer league model, where there are leagues organized around competitive and financial prowess, and a mechanism in place that allows for both promotion of the better "second league" teams and relegation of those in the top league whose performance deteriorates to a lower level. Were DCI to embrace that, they could still put emphasis on marketing their "premier" league while being clear with potential members and corps organizers that there was a way to grow into premier status. No reason to reinvent that wheel when it's already out there.
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I am not into androgyny; but neither my artistic taste nor yours is the point. Even if Manson's sales have dropped, all you have to do is look at Manson's ticket sales 'today', along with Manson's fan base 'today', and they are still way, way, way grater than any drum corps show ever was or is.
Only useful if you compare Manson's ticket sales to other similar acts (rock performers). From that standpoint, Springsteen still cleans everyone's clock, and his persona, while not being a macho posturer, is decidedly "guyish."
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Cixsy, there are simply no successful business models that embrace your utopian ideal in which every product, when there is a huge range of disparate design, construction and componentry, is promoted by the company that sells it equally. But I can give you dozens of examples of leagues, corporations, etc, etc, who clearly demarcate their products into different leagues and brands.
Honda, Toyota, GM, Ford and several others all have different brands for their products that allow them to identify them clearly to the public. Each brand gets its own marketing budgets and their own positioning statements in the marketplace, and has messaging designed to sell the key elements of the brand.
DCI right now has no such clear delimiting factors that could be easily understood by potential audience members, and as a result, people who don't know any better are not being told that the activity itself understands that there are differing levels of expertise and expectation. Sorry if the real world offends you so much .
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" promote it " to whom ?
If the " promote it " means" to the public at large ", then frankly, although some here may not want tp acknowledge it, the Jersey Surf of 2012 has more " showcase " appeal with the public at large than does the 2012 DCI champion, even though a compelling case can be made that the BD organization is more " professionally " run. If " promote it " means to its current primary customer base, the "schools, students and parents willing to foot the bill for instruction ", then BD and a few others might very well be the units " to showcase " to them.
But even here, I am not totally convinced that the BD has the most " showcase " appeal to them, even though they have quite clearly demonstrated on field competitive placement excellence under the current judging system . But as DCI's current standard bearer have we already convinced ourselves that BD is the best " showcase " unit ( as " the best " ) to "showcase" to both the public at large as well as to the schools ? Its certainly is an open question at the very least it would seem to me. I believe we need to differentiate between Corps with DCI on field competitive placement excellence and Corps with " showcase appeal " with the public at large. They are not neccessarily the same thing at all, imo.
I'd actually agree with much of this. But it doesn't change the fact that there are levels of proficiency differences among drum corps that are noticeable even to lay people (otherwise known as potential fans). Jersey Surf was very entertaining last year; not yet at genuine Bridgemen or VK level from a proficiency standpoint, but more entertaining than a lot of what else was in their range.
No one has brought it up, but part of the re-alignment should include genuine changes to the judging standards that would de-emphasize design and re-emphasize performance and actual effect vis a vis audience response. I'd mentioned before that any change made to DCI's business model should be about improving their bottom line (so they can afford to pay out more to the corps) and improving competitiveness in the field. The question is how many of the corps out there are really ready to take a certain ball and run with it, so that each one strives for a unique identity that is marketable to potential sponsors and audiences and appealing to the members. The answer, right now, is "not too many", but if there were mechanisms in place designed to give each corps no choice but to have a strongly defined, sellable persona, it would be a big help in helping to find new audiences.
I don't believe that DCI has reached anything close to saturation point with their audience base. I only believe that there's really not enough direction to put the energy on THAT as the primary objective for the organization.
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Jason Sutter marched with Sky Ryders; he is now the drummer for Marilyn Manson (in 2013); I suppose that he, as well as multi-millions of Manson fans, never got your memo!
Good for him. And for Glenn Kotche, Al Chez, and any number of other people who did drum corps and are now making a living with their skills.
None of that supports your overall position - that androgyny is somehow a big attraction for mainstream audiences. It's not (and if you look at Marilyn Manson's sales figures, the last release sold about 5% of what they did 15 years ago - not generally a sign of a growing constituency).
If you're into androgyny as a concept, cool, whatever floats your boat, but it's kind of goofy to think that your personal tastes are mainstream when the information out there indicates otherwise.
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Because it recurs among people who share most of the G7 point of view, like yourself, Slingerland, and whoever wrote the G7 proposal and put Pioneer in class AA with a question mark, while other better WC corps were relegated to class AAA.
I don't remember having said anything other than it makes sense to look at a system that organizes corps into leagues/divisions where their competitive capacity is a major, if not the major, consideration. You've said "just say that" several times, and I have. The question now is why anyone would object to that, given that capability and resources are almost always the major considerations when other sports leagues look at adding members to their ranks, or divvying up their teams into various levels.
Going back to my original post here, that discussion seems to be driven by 'passion' rather than reason. Those who are feeling that telling any corps whose season-ending scores are in the 70s that they should be competing against each other in their own league/division is told that they are being dismissive of those corps, when in fact, all they're doing is being realistic about those corps' competitive range. It's not a diss on those corps to simply try and get them into a better organized competitive situation.
I would imagine that you'd find a fair amount of crossover between corps that have younger memberships and their competitive placement, but if someone can put together a corps who can score 85 or 89 with an average age of 15, great, put them in the top division.
Again, it's about the business model of DCI. Were DCI to bring in an outside consultant group to help them clean up their messaging and model, I'd imagine the majority of consultants would tell them the same thing; they're trying to be everything to everybody, which is putting them in a very messy messaging position. If they want to promote the activity, their best shot will be to showcase the most professional units, not the units that aren't necessarily more proficient than the better competitive high school bands. Again, using that as a metric isn't to say that the lower ranking corps "suck", it's simply to call things as they are.
Get the passion out of it, take the personal affronts out of the picture, and look at it as a business question. The DCI model isn't working nearly as well as it could; what can they do to increase visibility of the activity and increase their overall revenue streams, so that all the corps are able to get back a lot more money from DCI than they are now?
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Okay, but isn't there something to be said for crowd sourcing? They also asked for feedback and have made changes to the format. And the fact that it was announced as actually happening instead of an "idea" made me really excited about it, as opposed to "proposals" which tend to never materialize.
Crowd sourcing in the formation process is sometimes an excellent idea (and sometimes not, since sometimes people have no idea what they really think until presented with a finished product). Crowd sourcing after you've already announced a new product is an approach that isn't used often, because it's too easy for the concept to be taken off into so many directions at once that no one knows what it is.
If the idea is a competition, especially, you have to have some rules in place, yes? What are the rules for Drumline Battle? Who are the judges? What are the standards? It's like saying "ok, here's a new game, throw a ball around", and leaving it at that, with nothing to give the participants guidance in terms of how and what to do in order to succeed.
Both ideas are very good concepts - but their rollout was not handled well.
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What bad news?
That DCI is running TOC?
That MiM is on "pause"?
None of which was known at the time the announcement was made. For all they knew, there was a major breakup on the horizon.
Go back and look at my central point; that you don't announce a consumer product launch for a product that hasn't actually been invented and can't be purchased on or around the day of the launch. My point stands.
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The sum total of what's paid to all the other corps, divided among the seven, wouldn't amount to a single year's expense for any one other them.
But looking at your own 990s thread, several of those 7 corps have budgets in the $900k to $1m range. Are you saying that DCI doesn't distribute at least that much to the other 14 or 15 World Class corps every year? Not arguing, but that doesn't seem likely, since all of them show performance fees well in advance of $70/80k.
Slightly moving to a side spur, what amount of their overall revenue would seem reasonable for DCI to be passing on to their member corps? Right now it seems to be about 20-25% of their gross dollars, but given that their primary function, as an organization, is collecting revenues in a central location and passing them out to their members, isn't that a little on the low side? Is there a formula in place that guides their business decisions?
For example, if DCI had, as part of their structure, a rule that they had to return forty cents on every dollar made directly to their member corps, it would make every business decision they made all about maintaining that type of efficiency. Do they have such a rule in place now? if not, then why not?
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ort/Drumline Battle rollout? These programs provide just the kind of scalability you would favor. They show the spark of structural creativity that you advocate. They were launched with proper coordination, proper communication, and with clearly focused marketing messages.
No company I would advise would send out a press release on a new product that hadn't actually been invented yet, so no, the launch was not handled well.
A proper launch would have been lining up a series of players and events before announcement, so that the announcement wasn't just a concept, but a series of actionable events (things people could actually sign up to perform in or buy tickets to see). The rollout was loaded with vague bits of information, which made it more of a teaser than an actual announcement, when that's not what they intended.
They're both good ideas, but should have been fully fleshed out before announcement, rather than being rushed into the public sphere in the efforts to blunt possible bad news from their meeting last month, which is how it was done.
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Gosh, you should talk to that Slingerland fellow and let him know, too.
LOL. Nice try. You can use elements of other forms of business in your business without most fully functioning adults saying that doing so makes the two businesses "the same" (and Mike D pointed out that the baseball analogy wasn't exact, point for point).
Baseball has major leagues and minor leagues, with different expectations and purposes. The major leagues get the bulk of the attention, but that doesn't mean that MLB doesn't understand the importance of their farm system too, since they need it there to develop talent that they've already scouted as having potential down the road. it's my contention that DCI could do well to look at elements of that model in reconsidering their business model, including creating partnerships between the top tier corps and those who are (or probably should be) competing in the Open Class level. Nothing really radical there.
The animus toward anyone suggesting that DCI needs a major overhaul is pretty unusual. Simply pointing out what is obvious to any stranger on the street (that some organizations present larger, more professional work, and some smaller, younger corps are not really competing with the big corps in any realistic fashion) is taken as being an assault on those younger, smaller corps. It isn't, anymore than pointing out the obvious - that in most places, high school-age teams are not competing against more experienced college-age teams, and for good reason. Pointing that out isn't saying that you don't like or value the high school-age team, it's just acknowledging their differences.
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"Tour of Champions" 2013
in DCI World Class Corps Discussions
Posted · Edited by Slingerland
Pardon me if my middle years are making my brain fuzzy...but didn't Regiment in 2008 win Finals? Their total GE score that year was within a hair of tying (and they won Music GE). How much more credit should they have gotten?
I'd be all in favor of a total overhaul of the judging standards. Absolutely. Shows that are more fun to watch should get more credit than shows that are less fun to watch, assuming the execution is the same, but better executed should still beat "fun" any day, because "better executed" is something that is totally in the control of the performers. Madison '99 was fine, but they weren't working at the level of what Vanguard and BD (or Cavaliers, for that matter) brought to the field. And if you listen to the crowd response to SCV that night, the audience seemed to be pretty #### happy with what they were doing, so it's not like Vanguard got credit for performing a dry show very well; they got credit for performing well AND for having a great overall package..
But hey, some progress here. We agree on something, kind of maybe.
Keep in mind, though, that even if the standards were changed to allow for more credit for execution, the lower-tier corps are still likely going to be scoring well-under the top-tier corps. It's a mistake to think that corps like BD and Crown, etc are where they are just because the judges like them (though I think there is some of that in there). They are where they are because they do the execution thing and performance thing extremely well.