A Decade (ish) of Texas Marching Bands

[snares]

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.xlsxFetching info...

[An Inspirational Pinecone]

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

[itsstephenyo]

Wow, amazing work! It really puts into perspective how heartbreaking it must have been to be Hebron for years and years and years, always the bridesmaid until Penstriped. For them to succeed at both the UIL and BOA level for the last decade speaks to how well taught they are. Also interesting how they're the first band to win BOA SA without winning GE. 

FloMo was on another level from 2015-2018. Does anyone remember what happened in 2017 that saw them take a dip in results? 

Looking at Vandegrift's 2019 season, good lord that band was astonishing that year. That show was incredible. 

Marcus murdered everyone in 2012 lol 

Reagan are the gods of Visual/GE. 

Very cool to see that Prelims champ only won 6/10 times. What a competitive event. 

So many "What-ifs?" What if FloMo went to Nats in 2016, what if Reagan went in 2019, what if Hebron went in 2021, what if CTJ had gone in 2017. 

We're spoiled here in TX. 

[snares]

  On 11/9/2022 at 4:25 PM, itsstephenyo said:

We're spoiled here in TX. 

Expand  

We definitely are! 

I think in compiling this there was also just a lot of stuff that I never realized or thought about in general.

For example, Vandegrift and Hebron both have pretty similar difficulties with being the bridesmaid/close to gold in BOA, medaling decently often but never quite getting to the gold, up until Hebron did last year, and it was so cool to see Vandegrift get the gold at UIL state this year. I'm rooting for them to take BOASA next year, but also am hoping for a 3-peat from Hebron since I don't think that's ever been done before at the super-regional.

I hadn't realized how consistent Keller had become at reaching finals. I always underestimate them and that's a shame on me, but their streak of 7 straight years is incredible.

CTJ has been remarkably consistent with their ability to stay in the top half of finals.

I also had sort of forgotten about the bands that were dominant in the early 2010's outside of Marcus. Bowie was one of my favorites when I was in high school and I had completely forgotten that they had medaled twice in 13 and 14. I'm excited to go back and include all of BOASA history into something like this, which will definitely be hard since I need to figure out some logistical things since there are basically two generations of high school bands at this point where many of the bands consistently making finals recently didn't back then and vice versa, but that's an entire decade of music history that I love and miss and want to relive since it's been so long at this point. Not only that, but in talking to some people on Saturday at finals, I realized that it's been long enough that most people just don't even know about how different the marching scene was in the 2000's. One parent was shocked when I told them that Bell was the most miraculous band most people had ever seen for a lot of those years. I'm never really a huge history person in general, but there's a lot of history at BOASA that I really want to relive and bring back to life.

[itsstephenyo]

Early 2000's LD Bell were gods. I remember being completely amazed by Stephen F. Austin's drumline and hornline in 03/04 or something down in San Antonio, the same year when they medaled at BOA and then got like 27th or something at SMBC. 

[slowbrass]

The fact that Marcus scored a 96 at San Antonio pre-score inflation is insane. Had it been a nats year for them, we may have seen a different score record fall last year in Indy. Also kind funny how we had the least competitive year (in terms of point spread) in 2012 and then followed it up with the most competitive year in 2013.

[Bandboi123]

I'd like to beat a dead horse a little bit here and point out a few things:

If Hebron did not score their record Music Individual score in 2022, they would still have the record for Music Individual with 19.6 in 2018.

If Reagan did not score their record Ensemble Visual score in 2019, they would still have the record for Ensemble Visual with 19.65 in 2017.

Reagan has scored the record for Visual GE (19.60) for 3 of the last 4 San Antonio competitions (2018, 2019, 2022)

The musical performance of Hebron and the visual performance of Reagan these past few years has been incredible to watch.

 

[Guest]

  On 11/9/2022 at 4:25 PM, itsstephenyo said:

Wow, amazing work! It really puts into perspective how heartbreaking it must have been to be Hebron for years and years and years, always the bridesmaid until Penstriped. For them to succeed at both the UIL and BOA level for the last decade speaks to how well taught they are. Also interesting how they're the first band to win BOA SA without winning GE. 

FloMo was on another level from 2015-2018. Does anyone remember what happened in 2017 that saw them take a dip in results? 

Looking at Vandegrift's 2019 season, good lord that band was astonishing that year. That show was incredible. 

Marcus murdered everyone in 2012 lol 

Reagan are the gods of Visual/GE. 

Very cool to see that Prelims champ only won 6/10 times. What a competitive event. 

So many "What-ifs?" What if FloMo went to Nats in 2016, what if Reagan went in 2019, what if Hebron went in 2021, what if CTJ had gone in 2017. 

We're spoiled here in TX. 

Expand  

Honestly, what would have happened if Vista went to Nats in 2018