DCI Ties: 1999

Of all the ties that have occurred during DCI's years of existence, this one is the most obviously not. Oh where to start?! Ok, first of all let's look at the recap... Santa Clara beat the Blue Devils by 0.1 in both GE music and GE Visual. What were the judges watching?!!! After listening and watching both shows dozens of times I see there being no less than a 0.3-0.4 gap in GE Music and a 0.4 in GE Visual. What does that give us?... a gap of at least 0.7 in GE when the judges on that night in 1999 had the gap at 0.2.
Moving one caption over, it's time to look at Ensemble Music and Visual. Ensemble music was, as I see it, the biggest gap between the two in any caption. The judges nailed the Vanguard's Ensemble music score, but the Blue Devils was about 0.2 to 0.3 too high. So, instead of there being yet another 0.1 gap we would have a 0.3 or 0.4 gap... again. The Blue Devils Ensemble visual was great, but if you wanna talk about difficulty and accuracy, it was not a 14.9 out of 15. The difficulty was that of the 94 Cadets and the accuracy of the 95 Cavaliers. If you want to put that in terms of a score out of 20, the Cadets' difficulty was a 9.7 and the Cavaliers accuracy was a 9.9. You now have a score of 19.6, which translated to a score out of 15 you have exactly 14.7. I agree with the judge's score of 14.7 for the Vanguard's Ensemble Visual, so BD and SCV tied in Ensemble Visual, and SCV was ahead by at least 0.3 in Ensemble Music, so SCV wins the Ensemble caption by 0.3. 

The last caption is performance. Honestly, I think that looking at the scoring system, the judges were right on money with their scores here! So, instead of being critical... I will say... "Thank you for a great job and being honest!" So this brings me to the conclusion and the recap...

SCV 19.8 19.8- 39.6 14.9 14.7-29.6 9.8 9.5 9.8-29.1     98.3

BD   19.5 19.4- 38.9 14.6 14.7-29.3 9.9 9.4 9.9-29.2     97.4

RECEIVING THE GOLD MEDAL.... THE 1999 DRUM CORPS INTERNATIONAL WORLD CHAMPION... WITH A SCORE OF 98.3... THE SANTA CLARA VANGUARD!!!