Why _____ Should Have Won

[kickhaltsforlife]

Spirit blew me away. I was ###### that they were pulling away from Crossmen at the beginning. (I always want to beat our closest family, hehe) but then I saw the show. Hot ####. Who saw that coming? Did spirit even see that coming? Spring training were they like where the #### did this corps come from? Or did their placement last year automatically write them off as a non contender for many? It was a surprise for me. They put out a good show the year before... but this show was top notch. And they performed the crap out of it.

I find me saying that about all the corps this year. And that might have a lot to do with how successful of a season it was. No corps seemed "flat" to the audience this year. 13th through 17th wowed people as much as 1-12. Might as well package it all in one dvd case it's all such high quality. Everyone won this year.

Don't get me wrong... there is still plenty of room for improvement... and i have a rant to come in the nearish future on judging and how it makes absolutely no logical sense to me. And a few other things that tic me off.

I think of shows that are going to get a lot of play. Just put the cd on shuffle and listen away! I'm all hype right now about this season. I wish I could have seen more in person. Can't wait for camp reports and show announcements.

you see, we ##### enough and start to get what we want.

Keep it coming next year.

So many good shows,

On topic now... I keep trying to pick one out of the top 6 who should have "won" and I can't. So.. Crossmen should have won. Because they should have won GE Music because it was that awesome. And they won everyone back. And had the best ballad of the year.

[TheBattman]

I'm still trying to figure out the "perfect 10s" The Cadets received, and trying to figure out how BD and the Cavies were really any "less perfect" in some of those captions... As a band director for many years, and has a DCI fan for over 3 decades, I'm just trying hard to figure out how any judge could score one corps as "perfect" (another argument in and of itself), and not give the same score to another corps that was every bit as clean...

Despite years of the activity, training, and "standards" - there will always be an element of subjective judgement. You cannot easily get around it without having ten times the number of judges (nowhere near practical). I think this is why threads like this one come to be - Even the "highly-trained" adjudicators miss things that even some fans see. Conversely - fans miss a lot that judges do see. Add in the fact that most everyone who posts here on DCP discussions have their own personal biases (admittedly myself included), and I don't know if there could ever be a 100% agreement on "who should have won", or "this is why ____________ should not have won".

There have been some years in DCI where one horn line was easily identifiable as "stronger" or better than others - same applies to the drum lines and guard... But more often than not, as the "top-tier" corps continue to polish, fine-tune, and make nearly a science out of show production - those differences often blur or become essentially too narrow to OBJECTIVELY differentiate.

In reality - the top 3 corps this year could have laid an legitimate claim to the title - and it would have been quite difficult to argue with the outcome, regardless. Beyond the top 3, the differences began to be more evident (though still, some super performances, to be sure!). I just don't see the point spread between the top 3... the corps' shows were not that different in quality/precision/effect.

And no - I do NOT desire a return to "shared titles" or so-called "ties"...