BlastFromThePast

Thanks for your play-by-play of all the shows (and @WanderingTraveler and @HagsTPT too, and others). Really missing the live blog team this year!

Me too. Anyone out there have them? Wish those would be officially posted instead of just the ordinals recaps.

Interesting exercise here. If each judge's scores were normalized to the range 0.1-1.0 and added together instead of converting them to ordinals and adding those together (as currently done), these are the results: Oak Ridge and Grand Oaks swap places, as do Klein and Klein Collins (both by non-trivial amounts too). Not to take anything away from any band, but this more accurately represents the judges' true scores. Normalization preserves each judge's relative weighting per band (which ordinals do not) yet also keeps each judge's score equally weighted in the total (which is the argument put forth in favor of the ordinals calculation.) I can only think the results of other UIL competitions are similarly affected, perhaps even more significantly in some cases. Just to be clear: I don't have any horse in this race, except for mathematical fairness. I am passionate about this activity and would just prefer to see a better scoring calculation for all these hard-working students and TX UIL. Judging marching contests is subjective enough. The ordinals scoring calculation throws unintended noise into the mix. IMHO, using the total of normalized scores would yield more accurate, and thus fairer, comparisons. And it's a minor change too -- just in how the total is calculated. Nothing about judging itself would be affected. I'll be repeating this exercise on the State results.

Congrats to all bands, but don't get me started on ordinal points. It's a mathematically challenged system.

The UIL rubrics have changed a lot in just the past few years, and have been split into separate branches: Open Class and Military Class. So, UIL Open Class is much more aligned with BOA rubrics now. Perhaps that will eventually play out with TX bands taking home the Eagle more often. In general, TX bands do seem to be getting more competitive: The BOA San Antonio Super Regional and UIL State contests are very high level, arguably the highest nationwide as a whole. There just seem to be the few perennial exceptional bands (Avon, Carmel, Broken Arrow) that manage to stay on top at GN, though TX bands did break through in 2007, 2013, and 2019 (seems TX is due in 2025 ) As for "limitations of practice" -- I cannot imagine H.S. bands practicing any more than they already do! How would that even be possible and still get other things done such as, oh, class work ? What more do those consistent GN top placement bands actually do that don't have these limitations? Or are there other factors? But I suppose this is a discussion for another place.

I know, I know, different performances, different set of judges. Scores can't be compared directly between semis and finals. STILL, interesting to see the shifting.

TW went in 2006 (where they were class champs but placed 4th in finals, after drawing 1st performance slot). They went again in 2007 and have alternated years since then as to not conflict with UIL State. Wonder how UIL State being every year now will affect TX representation at Grand Nats.

Seems Hebron & Carmel will be duking it out at the top, and Avon & TW just under them. Agree we should probably (?) see a captions split, but there are always surprises. Amazing level of accomplishment by all these bands.

Yes, this show had me a little confused. Some visual parts didn’t seem to complement the music very well. Nice color effects though.

Pearland, what a striking show. I like the traditional symmetric design punctuated by key moments of asymmetry. Their program has come a long ways competitively these last few years. Looking forward to their finals performance.

Go TWHS! (my hometown). Love the tight design and focused energy of this show, been really fun to watch it develop over the season. Wondering if the relative sparseness of the music will be an issue in scoring.

Avon had eye-popping visuals with those uniforms and frames but I think they will be held back a bit musically.

Nothing like a concert hall performance while doing insane marching. Amazing Carmel.

Agree, I hear Carmel is incredible this year and there are other serious contenders this afternoon. Hebron was amazing but nothing is a given at this point.

Incredible. Nobody blows the top off the stadium like Hebron. I regret not being there just for this. #nevermissagain

And just like that, another top-level marching band from TX arrives on the scene. Is this their first GN? Amazing the support for bands in this state.

Wondering if I can get one of those Morton set pieces for my backyard (before they put the covers on). Nice contrabass clarinet, don't hear that often in marching band!

Playing that soprano sax solo with such expression would be very nerve wracking in that huge suspended silence! Excellent.

Here's a visualization of the finals scoresheet (data taken from finals recap PDF posted by BOA). I'll post one after Indy GN finals too.

The ordinals system is mathematically, er, "challenged". It introduces an element of randomness (you could say spiciness) into the overall rankings. Thus there can be position shuffling in the overall placements that have little to do with the judges' actual scores. Without seeing the score sheets, I can't say that happened in this particular contest. But being a "fuzzy" subjective contest in the first place, IMHO it'd be better if the scoring system wouldn't add this additional spice. Then again, maybe it just adds to the excitement.

Was pretty good for the most part during prelims, definitely worth $12. I wish the ensemble field mics could be better -- the audio is a bit muddy. But it is hard to mic an entire band that's moving around a large field...

Nice little BOA 2022 wrap-up here, with TXBands bloggers. I'd be interested to see the notes Daniel Valdez said he was taking on Carmel's GN finals performance.

Agree that scores from different contests can't be directly merged and compared like that. Yet, I also agree it is useful. If you look at any given band's BOA scores throughout the season, they nearly always increase from contest to contest (e.g., Regional -> Super Regional -> GN). Placement changes from contest to contest happen because a band improves their score over time more than other bands, rather than bands' scores declining. So it seems reasonable to assume that most, if not all, of the SA finals scores represent a minimum of what they would have scored at GN (barring a major disaster of course). What's more unpredictable is how much higher these bands would have scored at GN.

Yep. Mapping each judge's score to an ordinal before adding them together introduces statistically random "noise" into the total score for each band. Perhaps this is what makes UIL results more surprising/unpredictable than other contests -- the element of randomness. Maybe this approach is meant to counter some of the subjectiveness.