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I think what it does is solidify sheets, which in turn helps getting more quality judges, which gives more consistent and relevant feedback, which leads to more useful information to design and instruct for a national stage. Indiana has ISSMA which is a base foundation for invitationals to use for sheets. Since their sheets are pretty well understood, even the average Indiana contest will have a BOA caliber judge at it. Go look at Center Grove and Avon's shows. They regularly have BOA National judges on those panels. Their state circuit also guarantees that within their 3 weekend system, every class has at least one national level judge on a qualifying weekend. Every group benefits from that level of adjudication weekly I would think.

Smart aleck. 🙂 2025-BOA-Grand-Nationals-Prelims-Recap.pdf 2025-BOA-Grand-Nationals-Semi-Finals-Recap.pdf 2025-BOA-Grand-Nationals-Finals-Recap.pdf

It's also really difficult when you have Texas sending 6 bands, all of them making semifinals, 4 of them making finals (which is less than what a contingency of Texas bands making finals usually is), and then there's Avon, Carmel, Broken Arrow, and your bands such as Mason, Blue Springs, Bentonville etc. who have risen over the past 10-15 years to becoming perennial finalists. What do all of these states (save for Missouri) have in common? A state championship series with judging sheets that don't change week in and week out.

To be honest, I don't know that there's much to take from placements 28-36 from semis as being very definitive "this band over this one." The same panel also had Morton over MC by 4 points in prelims. There were some weird shifts all over the place this weekend, (Jennison dropped 7 points in less than 24 hours.) I think some of those judges would have given an ice cream truck driving past Lucas Oil a 16.1 by the time they got to the end of their 8 hour judging shift.