Did BD's drumline cost them the Championship?

[Hulka]

It was obvious from my seat BD's battery didn't have a great run Saturday night, but as others have stated, there are other sub-captions that "cost" them the title as well.

[RickCogley]

BD's drums really did not sound very clean this year, so I am sure that had some level of effect to the score. But, it's part of the whole.

[salad315]

You can look at this a million ways, as a tenth in any caption makes a tie, or a change in champs. How I look at it??...Going on after cavies, bd actually fared poorly in field marching, losing by a tenth to them. Even though they still beat phantom in field visual, it was enough. Thanks cavies, for marching so clean!

*like i said, there's a million and one ways to look at this*

[pianolover1]

A friend and I argued about this in 1978 when a member of the rifle line of Phantom dropped a rifle and they got a .10 penalty and lost by that much. It was not just her fault. This is of course from the "tic" era

As he said....it was also the horn players who missed a note or cracked, a drummer who had a higher stick than the others, anyone of the corps who was out of step or out of phase or not perfectly in formation, etc.

If Blue Devils had their 4 -10's from Friday night in Visual

had pushed their horn line a bit more ( they stayed the same)

their color guard had the score they had Friday night ( they dropped .10)

It wasn't just the drum line.............

[Jeff Ream]

again, drums hurt a lot, but coupled with ensemble music, ballgame

[cowtown]

I understand why some might think this but you live or die as an entire corps, maybe if the color guard would have gotten a prefect score…

Anyway, great job blue devils

[AzEuph]

The same argument can be made about Phantom. Did Phantom only win because of their music GE, music ensemble, and percussion?

I say no. The drill, guard, vis ens., and all others helped contribute to their championship. It's not fair to the members of BD's drumline who worked so hard throughout the summer to put all of the lose on their shoulders.

[PR_ducky]

Having marched in 89 Regiment when we were said to have lost cause of drums, I can tell you it doesn't really work like that.

especially this year. BD lost by a total of .025, if ANY caption had popped an extra .1 they probably would have won, so might as well blame the high brass line for not picking up the slack. See what I mean?

As for the two percussion judges, JJ and Jeff, yes, they both marched Regiment, I marched with both of them.

Pretty sure Jeff marched somewhere before coming to Regiment, and JJ marched Dutch Boy, then Regiment, then aged out with BD.

Plus both are exceptional judges and Regiment won drums all 3 nioghts and they only judged finals.

Cheers all

[bluecoats88]

Answer to your question - did BD's drum line cost them the title?

Yes, and so did their guard and hornline because a corps is a total of all the parts not just one part.

That's like saying a pass that a wide receiver dropped in the fourth quarter cost a team the game, when other receivers dropped other passes during the game.

[DCIHasBeen]

In a word, yes ... They were fifth in drums. Quantitatively speaking that was apparent from the sheets.

The real question should be, given the phenomenon of the whole Phantom Regiment/Spartacus thing, is there something inherently wrong with the sheets that would allow a corps and show that virtually everyone agreed was the best thing in the house, to only win by an infinitesimally small margin?

The answer is that General Effect is not about Effect from an audience perspective and I still maintain, after all these years, that it is a mistake to have that inherent in the system.

There are sub-captions in GE that could reflect this, but it would have to realign how communication is defined.

The question should be, how can we re-define the vocabulary of adjudication so that when a corps that displays Regiment's quality at that degree of excellence and connects with the audience in that way, it is given a representative valuation in the scores.

Not easy to do, but that's not saying it shouldn't be attempted.