With all of the scores for the 54 bands, we’ve put together an unofficial “road to state” CAS chart. Note: this is NOT the official CAS; we do not know if bands are choosing to use scores other than the ones we’ve used.
I was curious what these numbers would look like if we aligned them regardless of Flight. Below, I am including the top 20 bands in Michigan, regardless of Flight. On the left, they are in order of CAS (Championship Average Score – the “AVG” column from the images above). On the right, it is in order of highest earned score on October 26.
I’ve often been curious what the MCBA State Finals would look like if it operated similar to that of BOA Grand Nationals, where bands compete regardless of class (flight, in our case). If you’re ever curious, I have a whole plan of how MCBA could change its competition structure to allow for the above chart to be relevant; email me and we can talk about it. If I get enough interest in my theories, I could even do an article here sometime.
Before anybody gets upset, I do just want to throw out there that this “Top 20” was just for fun. I do recognize that this is in no way accurate, at all. We had three contest sites with three different judging panels. There is no way of knowing how the bands actually would have scored if they were all performing against one another. We won’t know, in fact, until Saturday when the top 12 bands of each Flight come into competition with their entire flight. And, even then, one could argue that you could not accurately assess all four Flights against each other, as there are two judging panels for State Finals. I would be very, very, interested, though, in seeing how our MCBA bands would end up in ranking and in score if they could all compete against each other. I think a lot of spectators would be very surprised in the results.