It has definitely been an exciting year for the 2019 Drum Corps International Summer Tour! Lots of movement in the Top 12 Corps throughout the summer with two clear favorites for Finals this weekend which we’ll get to in a moment. I was able to see all of these Corps in San Antonio for the Southwestern Championship on July 20th, but I had some really cheap seats and really couldn’t hear and see the Corps really well. Lesson learned, I will definitely splurge for better seats in the future. I used to go to San Antonio every year, but having lived in New York from 2014-2017 and being dead broke last year I hadn’t been in a while.
Before the season began I wrote a post on my predictions for who would win this year’s Championship by looking at the last 6 years of data (2013-2018). I ended up with the predictions presented here in Table 1.
Looking back at these predictions, there is definitely some modifications that needed to be made. Thankfully we can do a reset with all the new data from this year’s regular season. First let’s look at how the regular season turned out.
2019 Analysis
From Figure 1 we can see the number of 1st place finishes for all the World Class Corps in 2019. The Bluecoats lead all Corps by a pretty large margin getting 1st place 25 times this season. They came out of the gate back in late June constantly placing 1st in most of their competitions. The Blue Devils were next with 12 1st place finishes followed by Carolina Crown and Santa Clara Vanguard.
So how did the different Corps track throughout the season? That is best shown with Figure 2.
Here you can see the comparison of the different scores of the Top 6 Corps throughout the regular season. You can see the Bluecoats had a clear advantage over all the other Corps until about mid-July when they started switching places with the Blue Devils. Speaking of that…
Looking at the Head-to-Head match-ups between the Blue Devils and the Bluecoats, you can see how many times each Corps placed above the other. I actually would have preferred to see how they would have done had they met earlier in the season, but the first time they saw each other in the same competition was in Broken Arrow, OK on July 16.
Figure 4 shows the score comparisons of each when they did meet in competition. You can see how they switched places which could make for an extremely exciting finish to the season over Championship Week.
In Figure 5 I also wanted to show the two West Coast behemoths in Head-to-Head competition. Santa Clara Vanguard is the defending champion, and they certainly started strong in late June. However, it didn’t take long for the Blue Devils to overtake them on June 30th in San Bernardino, CA.
As I did with the Top 6 Corps, I also looked at the Top 7-12 Corps. As you can see there was a lot of movement here. One of the most notable surprises to occur was on my birthday, July 24th. It was in Hattiesburg, MS where the Mandarins outscored The Cadets for the first time in their history. The Mandarins have been making lots of moves in the last few years so I’m sure they are very proud of that milestone. Granted it was the only time this season that they were able to do that in Head-to-Head competition, but it was definitely something to celebrate!
And so now we get to…
Prelims Predictions
Table 2 shows my predictions for the Prelims tomorrow night in Indianapolis. If you follow me on Twitter I’ve been posting my scores predictions for nearly a month. I spent one week early doing daily predictions, took some time off to do some tuning, then provided predictions for competitions in San Antonio, Atlanta, and Allentown, PA with RMSE’s of 1.51, 1.09 and 1.01 respectively. I definitely feel that my predictions (using Python and its various packages) are getting better and better so lets see how I do as we go along.
Not too many surprises here. I’m predicting that the Bluecoats will continue their dominance, but it will definitely be pretty tight there in the Top 3.
Tomorrow night the Top 15 Corps will be presented live to theaters around the country at Big, Loud & Live 16. I should be at my local theater for the last hour or so since I’ll be in a remote class when it first begins. Should be fun!
Also wanted to give props to the From the Pressbox website (@FromThePressbox on Twitter) for providing a better page for looking at all the scores on any given day at a glance. It was extremely helpful for me throughout the summer.