What the 2026 Season Meant
The retrospective window is three weeks long at most. Here is what the sheet said about the summer while the summer is still the thing people are arguing about.
Read →Articles & Analysis
Original reporting and data-driven analysis. Every piece is sourced from the score archive, caption sheets, or named primary sources. Newest first.
Cavaliers Brass Staff Departure: What the Organization Concluded About Itself
When a corps decides the gap is too wide to close with the same people, the change is a legibility event. Three seasons outside the top six; the organization has published its read. Unconfirmed; hedged throughout.
Read →The Mandarins Are Coming Back
A unanimous board vote on the Fourth of July started the process of a 2027 return. The steering committee, the senior leadership, the funding target, the World Class show they hosted in their own dark year, and the pipeline program they just launched: the deliberate shape of a comeback.
Read →The 2026 Panel Review
A full season of panels who never saw each other's numbers, read side by side: the hot rooms, the cold rooms, the captions that moved as a bloc, and the corps whose scores depended most on who was holding the pencil.
Read →The Fan Effect Index
One question, asked of twelve Finals performances: would I look it up again? Not was it clean, not did it earn the sheet. That question produces a different order than the judges produced. Here is both orders, the size of the disagreement, and an honest attempt to find out what the difference is made of.
Read →How They Moved
Three nights, same building, same sheet, rotating panels. All twelve finalists decomposed caption by caption: what moved, what held, what slipped, and what each of those was actually worth once the sheet’s own weighting is applied.
Read →The championship recap
99.1, and the night that produced it.
Read →ScoJo Came Home
Scott Johnson has been teaching drums for the Blue Devils for roughly fifty years. Heart surgery at the end of June took him off the road for the first time in most people’s memory. On Friday night in Indianapolis he walked back in, and a drum line that had spent all summer holding itself together stopped being able to.
Read →Crown’s Ave Maria
Carolina Crown took bronze and won the brass caption, and neither of those is why the concourse was still talking about them forty minutes later. There is a stretch in the middle of that show where an entire hornline plays as one instrument. The stadium stood up three separate times inside eleven minutes.
Read →Why Not Higher?
Two corps the building was louder about than the panel was. Phantom Regiment finished 7th and won Fan Favorite. Santa Clara Vanguard finished 5th with every caption getting praised on the way past. They are completely different cases, and calling both of them robbed gets both of them wrong.
Read →The 2026 Season
Seven weeks, 49 scored shows, and twelve corps that walked into Lucas Oil Stadium as completely different organizations than the ones that opened in late June. Who travelled furthest, which captions did the travelling, how close the model got, and what each of the top twelve carries into the winter.
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