Prelims Recap
I did end up getting to see more Corps last night in the theater than I originally thought I would. I arrived shortly after 8 PM CST when the Blue Stars were performing on the field. Theater was not full but there was certainly a great deal of enthusiasm for all the performances in there.
Of course, for me, it’s all about those goose bump-inducing performances, and I felt that with the Boston Crusaders, The Blue Devils, and the Bluecoats. The funny thing was that I didn’t get those goosebumps for Bluecoats until they started playing “Hey, Jude” right at the end. I don’t actually associate “Hey, Jude” with the Beatles since I’m more familiar with the Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson arrangements of that song! That was something I mentioned when ROCKETMAN came out in theaters. There were songs in that movie performed by Elton John that I had always associated with Maynard Ferguson so I never realized there were Elton John songs!
Table 1 shows how my predicted scores matched up with the actual scores from last night. The overall Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) ended up being 1.1 which went up from the previous trend. A little disappointing, but I’m hoping that I can get some more accurate scores for tonight and tomorrow night.
I have to apologize to Blue Stars fans as well as fans of Phantom Regiment. I didn’t even have Phantom in the Top 12 with my original predictions, and you can see that my predictions were way off for Blue Stars.
Semifinals Predictions
One of the things that I think makes predicting final scores difficult is that there is not a regular frequency between competitions in the individual Corps schedule throughout the summer. On the weekends you will see Corps perform on consecutive nights, but then you can have a gap. That gap will normally also results in a nice bump in scores. I would hope that a good model could take that into account, but, just like anything having to do with predicting the future, it’s hard! Thankfully, the Prelims, Semifinals, and Finals rounds of the Championships happen on consecutive nights, so here’s hoping that my predictions will be more accurate.
Table 2 shows my predictions for tonight’s Semifinal round. I’m still showing Bluecoats as the clear #1 pulling away from the Blue Devils, but there is no change in the order from the Prelims. There is a part of me that is really pulling for Mandarins to jump over The Cadets either tonight or tomorrow night though. Wouldn’t that be something? I know last year they did jump one ahead in ranking from the Prelims (11th place) to Semifinal round (10th place), and my model actually predicted that. I was very proud of that!
Unfortunately tonight’s performances will not be shown in any theater, but they will be shown live online! In any case, enjoy tonight’s performances!