MikeRapp

LOS handles 60,000 NFL fans eight times a year. It’s all about how much you can pay them to staff appropriately. If you only open three gates then it doesn’t matter where you go. You cannot squeeze 20,000 people through three gates in an hour.

The coaches they hire go there because they are paid more and have more opportunities to win.

With all due respect, you are biased.

As I have said every season around this time—quoting the great basketball coach Eddie Fogler, when asked if officials are biased: “Every official knows who is supposed to win.” Of course the judges are biased. All people are. Sticking with the sports theme: No matter what rules you want to make, some members will have an inherent advantage. You can change the college basketball recruiting rules a thousand ways to Sunday—Kentucky, North Carolina, Duke and Kansas are still going to dominate. Winning in any competitive scenario involves having more and better resources than your opponents. BD has more and better resources than every one of their competitors and it’s not really very close. Therefore competition also isn’t very close.

A designer has 12 minutes to build and deliver their story. Don’t waste 20% of it on a big tarp that people stick their heads through. And if you have the best brass arranger in the business, don’t spend part of your third act having them wave a ###### flag around on the back line.

If you are Crown, and you take your arrangement approach and apply that to your show design, you have problems. Same exact thing happened to Cadets with the same results. In design, less is usually more. Its easy to have hindsight now. Bottom line to me is, if you show design is almost entirely dependent on crowd participation—in this day and age of repetitive viewing and online analysis—you are taking a very big risk. Imo too big of a risk. My guess is their leadership would agree, in hindsight.

I’m really surprised you have BD third and Phantom second. Explain?

As finals week progressed it became pretty clear the accurate ranking of corps. The only quibbles I have were the huge drop for Cavaliers (extremely rare in this activity) and Crown not being given more credit for their work apart from what I feel was a fundamentally limiting show concept. But, the top 12 were fairly clear after watching three days of the same shows.

Phantom still needs to decide their brand direction. They can only go so far with another louder version of Phantom. Cadets seem to be on the right track. I do think Boston medaling will impact east coast recruiting, though.

All art is derivative. In fact all human creation is derivative, by design and by nature.

Medals aren’t the point; order of finish is the point.

Good artists borrow. Great artists steal. — Picasso

I thought Blue Knights would climb into that top tier. Clearly didn’t happen. Blue Stars seem like the next logical candidate. They will need to take the next step in their brass and percussion, which starts with recruiting.

Olympic ties

If two Olympic Marathoners have the exact same time at the finish line, do we award one the silver because they had nicer shoes? Awards are given based on performance on the field, determined by unbiased judges and agreed to criteria. If two, three or eight competitors finish with the exact same score, they tie. It’s pretty obvious.

Because that’s how the member corps want it.

No other competitive org does it that way. In the Olympics if two tie for silver there is no bronze.

I’m just super happy for Boston. Was genuinely afraid Crown might take the bronze.

That’s a pretty arbitrary way of breaking down the numbers, don’t you think?

I understand what you are saying, but three corps scored higher than Crown. Not two.

Three scores were better than Crown.

I thought the next corps to win their first medal would be Knights. Now I say Blue Stars.

Let me just humbly say again that I predicted a tie for the silver!

No issues whatsoever. Both are deserving.

I’m so happy for both corps.