An Inspirational Pinecone

Shoutout to our honorary Texas band Avon! 13 Years of waiting, now come down to San Antonio again.

Before scores start, I want to thank, not just the bands that performed these past 3 days, but to all the kids in band this year, not just here in Texas. I think personally, 2019 was my favorite year or marching band all around. Every band had incredible shows, and GN's was peak, but 2023 ya'll, this was something real, real special. Getting to see so many wonderful performances both live and on Box5 for these past two months has been so much fun, so thank you, to all the kids around the nation who made this year possible. For putting in countless hours of work, for you dedication and hard work, for performing through the sweat in tears, and for allowing us to have the opportunities to witness magic on the field be made. I've made countless memories this season, and I can't wait already for 2024. Thank you to all the kids, parents, boosters and band enthusiast that made this season so special, and what may be my new personal favorite season of marching band. And to our 12 finalists, no matter what the results are, be happy and proud of yourselves for all that you have accomplished this season! 

No reason to be toxic, please don't hate on other bands like this

Good morning everyone! We are here live on Box5 for the BOA Grand Nationals Semi-Finals, which will start shortly the Marian Catholic HS marching band! It's crazy to think today is the last day of the season, I mean I remember the first day like it was sometime last week, and to think after today it will be over is crazy, so to all the bands performing today, give it your all, and best of luck to all the bands performing today! 

If anyone is interested, I combined every score/recap from this season into a sortable google sheet and did some crude analysis for Grand Nats predictions. Here's the link
Lemme know via DM what y'all think

The Marcus and L.D. Bell resurgences are just the greatest.

Nope. LSU lost to Alabama.

WAY TO GO BLUE RAIDER BAND!!! They've got me in tears..... I remember when I saw the name for their show, I was a bit worried, but boy was I wrong, THIS SHOW IS INCREDIBLE!!!! Tons of VGE throughout the show with the many different formations of dots, soloist were on fire, guard was great, love their music book, this show is definitely one of my favorites of the year, and I'm so happy they made finals, definitely showed us why they were top half, I mean wow L.D. Bell, thank you so much for giving us that wonderful show to enjoy, and congratulations on an amazing season and a fantastic finals run!!! 

As someone who loves mindlessly staring at stats and then completely forgetting them afterwards this was awesome to look at, thanks for making this!

Pearland is confirmed and Klein Oak is rumored.

I would honestly LOVE for a time-limited rebroadcast of every contest to be an option. I know kids would love to be able to watch themselves perform after a memorable contest. Not every band has the time and resources to do a high quality recording of themselves at contests and I can imagine this being a decent revenue stream for Box5 or Flo or whoever.
I understand copyright issues are complicated but what a win this would be for just about everyone.

I put this list together just for grins.  This list includes the scores from the SA finals and the GN finals and then sorts the bands in order from those scores.
I know you can't compare scores exactly between contests but I think from a relative sense you can get an idea.
 

I double dog dare ABC to come to San Antonio. All at once. Do it.

haven't seen Mason. goin' into the contest my top 3 would've been Carmel, Avon, then Broken Arrow. not really digging BA's show this year. last year was a masterpiece, pure poetry, this yr is generic epicness and intensity w/ clunky set pieces.
if u ain't entirely Cartwrighted out after this finals lineup u never will be. hahaha.
3 outta 4 tx bands make it into finals, 2 new ones. amaaazing. sad for M&G but they had a great season.
SA is officially more competitive than Nats this yr at least. no big surprise there i'm sure.

As someone who loves mindlessly staring at stats and then completely forgetting them afterwards this was awesome to look at, thanks for making this!

Fun fact: if you take the SCORES from the recap and average them instead of the rankings, this is how it turns out.
1 Hebron 98.329 (+1)
2 Vandegrift 97.971 (-1)
3 Cedar Ridge 97.614
4 The Woodlands 97.014
5 Vista Ridge 96.857
6 Reagan 96.757
7 Flower Mound 95.471
8 Marcus 94.686 (+1)
9 Coppell 94.214 (-1)
10 Keller 93.171 (+1)
11 Round Rock 92.857 (-1)
12 CTJ 92.071
13 Waxahachie 91.329 (+1)
14 Pearland 91.257 (-1)
 

As someone who loves mindlessly staring at stats and then completely forgetting them afterwards this was awesome to look at, thanks for making this!

As someone who loves mindlessly staring at stats and then completely forgetting them afterwards this was awesome to look at, thanks for making this!

This will be a long post, so bear with me here.
So for my own curiosity, I've been working on a spreadsheet that displays all of a finalist school's scores and placements for BOA contests over the past 11 years (10 contests, since 2020 was cancelled), and essentially averages them amongst many other things. You'll find a bunch of information in here, such as average placement in BOA and UIL, highest scores in BOA sub-categories, fun facts about the champions, things of that sort. I've added all BOASA Finals and 6A (or 5A for the 2 comps that the highest classifications had not yet been upped) UIL State awards, including 6A from today and BOA from Saturday. 
In making this, I did have a few decisions I had to make. How far back should I go? 10 contests is an arbitrary number, which is nice and round, and I liked that is sort of encapsulates a generation of marching band without including a too large or small amount of data points. The results would change a decent amount if I included 11 or 9 contests, but I chose 10, again because it is a nice round number that also lines up with UIL state years, and because it also includes one of my all time favorite shows, Marcus 2012 :). 
Keep in mind that this is how bands perform in finals, so if a band did not make finals, I didn't just include their prelims scores. Because finals are judged differently than prelims, and scores vary heavily between the two, I felt more comfortable just leaving out those data points for those bands who had not made it or attended for various other reasons in that year. Additionally, if a band had less than 3 finals appearances, I still included their results, but not in comparison to the other more consistent finalists, as their averages would not be as statistically accurate as those with more data points. If they did have a record high in a category that didn't involve an average, I would've still added them there (but I do not remember this occurring in anything that I looked at). For example, Avon, Owasso, and Blue Springs were included in the main sheet, but if they want to be more involved then they should come and hang out with us a little more often!
Finally, when comparing BOA and UIL, I decided to leave out 2020, only because most bands were not able to attend and there was not an adjacent BOA event to compare data to. I added the disclaimer in the spreadsheet for CTJ since they obviously won a championship and that should not be ignored, but additionally in fairness to the many other bands who chose not to attend, I just didn't include it.
Here are some interesting notes I found while looking through it and working on it:
FloMo and CTJ both have won their championships only in years that they have also won a caption, meaning that there hasn't been a year in which they've won a caption and not won the championship. So for future reference, if either of them win a caption, you know they're going to be the champ! (sarcasm, somewhat) BOA champions have only won Music in 5 out of the 10 contests Hebron in 2022 is the only champion in the last decade to have won finals without winning GE. There have been 12 Music awarded, 8 of which have gone to Lewisville ISD schools (2 ties, 2014 between Marcus and Leander, and 2015 between Marcus and Hebron) Reagan holds records in all Visual and GE sub-captions, Hebron has records in all Music sub-captions (there are some ties in there in each as well) While it may seem like a long time ago, Marcus still has by far the largest win in BOASA recent history, leading the pack by a massive 2.85 points in 2012. FloMo's Leonardo show is the only show that has come even remotely close to that in 2016, winning by 2.05. Let me know some other things you find that are interesting to you! And if there are any mistakes or anything, let me know and I'll edit them and re-upload!
Finally, as I have already mentioned multiple times, this is completely arbitrary. The results would be different if I chose 7 years or 13 years or 18 years. Completely different. 10 years was the perfect amount for what I was looking to compare. I'm thinking about doing this for the most recent 5 years and the past 20 years as well just to have additional spans of time to compare, but as you can imagine, adding that data would take quite a while to what already took me quite a bit of time so it'll take me a while to get to those.
A Decade of Texas Marching Band.xlsx

Zoom, enhance. 

We Are All Winners In Life Every Band Here Deserves First Place Hebron

1st - Waxahachie 
2nd - Hebron
3rd - The Woodlands
4th - Ronald Reagan
5th - Flower Mound
6th - Cedar Ridge
7th - Coppell
8th - Vista Ridge
9th - Keller
10th - Marcus
11th - Pearland 
12th - Round Rock
13th - Claudia Taylor Johnson
14th - Vandegrift

The 2nd post gets at my response to the first.  When my kids started at Vista Ridge, they went to MANY contests where they did not make finals. And it was particularly difficult watching their sister schools having so much success at the same time. 
Vista Ridge is absolutely proof that it can change. 

This has been the same conversation for years.
When Marcus and L.D. Bell reigned supreme people wondered what was the point. When Westfield and Reagan were the kings people wondered why they ought to keep trying.
These comments and concerns are ingrained into competitive marching. It can be hard to keep missing after trying, but we have to remember some things.
Its more about the results it’s about what you learn through participating and putting effort.
Do the same bands seem to keep reigning supreme? Yes. However we put too much focus on big finalist achievements instead of focusing on big accomplishments on a smaller scale.
Glenn broke their first 80 ever at San Antonio this year, Argyle swept AA as a newly 5A band, Pecos won A with a 2 rating at region. Small accomplishments need to be amplified, because there’s value we don’t see.
Money is an issue, sure.. Any competitive activity at the HS level will always have that inequity at its core, and that’s a huge shame.
I would say “judging bias” is always a big concern, but I rarely see it. Outlier scoring can seem shocking on the surface, but some analysis can usually bring genuine justification.