Fan participation in scoring

[Stick Stack]

I'm not whining about my last summer. We marched dirty. I know that. I've seen it! Anyway, I'm just saying it's hard to not play favorites or "slot" for that matter. Take percussion for example. 2002 Cavies had a dirty dirty drumline. I've heard it over and over and it's full of ticks. BUT, since the rest of the corps was amazing, they are certainly not going to be a 8th or 9th place drumline. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

This happens in the opposite fashion too. I've seen some pretty amazing drumlines in some not-so amazing corps, but they still are placed low in their caption. Magic 03, Crossmen 04.

I see this occurance too. My friend was just telling me when I mentioned what you said and he told me how he felt Madison's drumline individually should have been ranked much higher, kind of like they were earlier in the season. However, since the whole corps was going down in the ranks, I think individually it hurt the drumline. Also, I thought the Cadets and Crown's color guards should have done better, but their corps ranking gradually pulled them down throughout the season.

I think with the current system, I get the impression that if the sum of the parts is not a whole, then the parts suffer for it. And vice versa, if the sum of the parts makes something completely whole, it doesn't matter as much if those parts are made out of scrap pieces because the whole works.

[Jofus]

Yeah we were headed towards 6th place in drums, maybe even 5th because we had beaten SCV at Allentown and Atlanta, and the Cadets at Atlanta and Semi finals. Then our scores dropped, trust me not because we played bad, and somehow Boston pulled ahead. Enough about that though.

[silvertrombone]

I don't know much about percussion so I won't comment on that - HOWEVER, he does have a point. At present, it is not possible for a corps outside of the top 3 to win a caption.

I believe there was at least one instance back in the day where a corps won drums, but didn't even make finals. That is impossible in todays durm corps. I agree that some corps are better than others - but would also agree that some benefit of the doubt is sometimes given. It is hard for me to believe that a single corps is better in every caption than every other corps is at any.

Bingo! VK '93, if I remember correctly, had a killer drumline--placed something like 3rd??? Caption head by the name of Paul Rennick, me thinks. His drum lines at North Texas just follow him around. SkyRyders, VK, Crown, Phantom--cultish. Actually, just plain cult. But they're awesome and they always have been.

No diss on VK, but they're horns were not 3rd place calibre, so they missed finals. I'm going off of hearsay so don't quote me on the details, but Raphael's point exactly.

Another couple of thoughts...if fans had 20 points to award, where would '06 Cadets place? Now again, I was right there with the 6 year old in that I "got" the white rabbit and Queen of Hearts, etc. Actually, I kind of missed them not having a Cheshire Cat! But a great deal of fans did not appreciate this show as much as I did. If those 10,000 got to award 20 points, where would such shows place?

How about Star '93? Great show, lots of love these days, but something tells me it would have been much lower than 2nd by far more than 1/10th of a point.

I spoke of the points difference in June and on Finals night elsewhere. Quick review. Phantom started out 4 points down to BD, 3 points down to Cavies, 2 points down to Cadets. They passed BD Finals night, finished up 3+ points to Cadets, and missed Cavies by 0.35 or some such. Where would they have been scoring in June if fans had some say-so? Where would Cadets have been placing?

Some of you have ignored my "Don't say 'it can't work'" statement. Someone else suggested texting scores via cell phones. Hello? How many of us DON'T have those? And I promise you it could work. It's called statistics, folks. And if you haven't studied it or taken a college math class yet, please don't discuss that which you don't know about. I suspect each corps would have a glob of dots concentrated around 0 points, a mass of dots around 20 points, and a glob in between. Everybody would have their lovers and haters. The winner would probably have a larger middle glob favoring the north side of 50%, the lower placing corps would go down from there. If you don't know what I just said, take stats. Look up standard distribution, the equation of a line, and variance.

Now, do I know HOW it could work? Nyet. We from North Texas aren't smart enough for that junk--or bored enough! That's what some MIT or Cal Tech Math professor would be for. That's the kind of drivel that gets those guys going and keeps them up at night--numbers! I read a book a while back on numbers--the author practically ejaculated just talking about them. That's great! Put some bell curve together in a laptop, have the text messages come in, delete the high 30% and the low 30% to get rid of all the lovers and haters of any particular corps, then run some fancy quadratic equation and have the computer spit out the results. There would be room for the fans to express their approval, yet room to massage the numbers to get rid of bias (either direction) and see what the fans truly like.

Statistics. It's like Algebra only more advanced. So if you're one of those that ever sat in 8th grade Algebra class and said, "I won't ever need this crap," please register for stats some day. Interesting stuff. Very applicable, believe it or not. Even in drum corps scoring! Not hatin', just sayin'.

Jofus--uniforms--right on.

Raphael--I must be dense--what do you mean with dirt?

[raphael18]

Dirt - as in mistakes (ticks if you like)

I guess it was a veiled shot at the cry of politics. However, after I thought about what he said, it reminded me that he has a point. I have my own gripes about some things that happened that I felt may have been political (then again, few Regiment people don't have a similar gripe).

That's when I wrote the follow-up post.