Behind The Score
The crowd rose in anticipation, cheering louder with each buck, spin and kick. When the eight-second buzzer sounded and John Crimber dismounted from Whiskey Trip, he landed in the soft dirt — and cemented himself as the No. 1 bull rider in the world. His big-time ride in a big-time moment helped give him his second win of the young PBR season, and everybody in the Enterprise Center in St. Louis, Missouri, screamed in delight.
Well, almost everybody.
Not Allan Jordan.
He had work to do.
A longtime PBR judge, he admired the ride as much as anybody, maybe more so given his decades of experience exulting in bull riding’s exquisite details. He turned quickly to his tablet, tapped on a number and scribbled on a piece of paper.
Outstanding performances by the bull and the rider combined to create high theater.
“It’s beautiful,” Jordan says. “That kid is riding so good.”
And the score — 91.25 — reflected that.
That’s a simple number, but the method to create it and report it to the masses is complex.
Allan Jordan spent decades riding bulls and even longer judging bull rides. Photography by Bull Stock Media
Judging in PBR combines artificial intelligence technology, cowboy ingenuity and lightning-quick decision making that takes years to master. Man plus beast plus high-speed cameras plus human subjectivity — there is nothing quite like it in the sports world. With so many moving pieces, how is the score determined?
The event offered numerous judging challenges, from a call for a re-ride after a lackluster performance by a bull to a replay challenge about whether a rider touched a bull with his off arm to a rider disputing whether he had been thrown off before the eight-second buzzer to the never-ending debate about what score a qualified ride deserves and why it deserves it.
After Crimber’s ride and every other one that day, the eight-second horn had hardly stopped echoing across the Enterprise Center before Jordan turned his number in.
The ability of Jordan to watch performances by a bull and a rider, analyze them and assign them a number immediately is only possible because he has seen thousands of bull rides in his two decades as a rider and even longer than that as a judge.
Five other judges, for a total of six, sat around the arena and did the same thing as Jordan.
Each judge scored both rider and bull, and the two numbers were then added together for qualified rides; only the bull gets a score on a buck off.
All six judges submitted their scores after each ride. The lowest two were dropped; the final score was the average of the remaining four. Scoring runs on a 100-point scale. The threshold at which a good ride becomes great is 90.
A bull is graded on bucks, kicks, spins, intensity and power. A rider is scored on how he counters the bull — how centered he is and how fluid his movement is. A rider will lose points for being “behind” the bull, meaning he reacts late to movements. A rider gets bonus points for style, such as spurring.
All of this is, of course, subjective. Throughout the day, Jordan told me his scores. They varied between being lower, higher, or dead on with the aggregate.
One key factor was location. For example, the closer a judge is to a ride, Jordan says, the more likely he is to score it high. A bull ride looks more gnarly when it’s right in your face.
Even so, six judges could sit in the exact same spot, watch the exact same ride and give it six different scores. That’s unavoidable, and part of the fun of for fans is arguing about the scores. Though, you’ll never hear PBR riders complain publicly about their scores.
“We don’t allow poor sportsmanship,” Jordan says. “If you’re going to throw a fit, you do it after and away. Never on TV.”
While there is room for differences of opinion among judges, riders, fans and media, there is no room for mistakes.
Jordan is building accountability into the process, which he says has been lacking across Western sports. After each event, he reviews each judge’s scores, including his own. Jordan keeps track of “misses,” and a judge who accumulates too many gets demoted to lower-level events to refine their work. Only judges with the best records get invited to PBR’s top-level events, which draw from a pool of roughly two dozen judges. For lower-level events, that number is about 130. Jordan holds himself to the same high standards, if not higher.
“Everybody’s going to screw up,” Jordan says. “If you start making excuses, it doesn’t work for you. You take it on the chin and say, ‘That’s how I get better.’”
Jordan and his fellow judges see each ride only once, live as it happens. If they happen to glance at a replay on the big screen and see they messed up — scored too high or too low or missed a foul — there’s nothing they can do about it.
Within seconds of a qualified ride, the judge has to submit scores for both bull and rider. Photography by Bull Stock Media
But PBR, like other sports leagues, has taken steps to correct officiating errors when possible with the help of technology. The NFL has had instant replay for decades. In baseball, some leagues use cameras to determine balls and strikes. In NASCAR, the winners of close finishes are determined using a high-speed camera with a laser beam that takes up to 20,000 pictures per second. PBR has turned to technology to start the clock on a ride and to settle disputes when a rider thinks he made a qualified ride but judges say he didn’t.
In the championship round in St. Louis, Daniel Keeping sat in the chute atop a bull named Baldy. Keeping nodded, the chute opened and Baldy exploded out. An AI-powered system called SkySmart watched from above and started the clock when Baldy’s shoulders cleared the chute.
After seconds of jumps and spins, Baldy’s late change of direction sent Keeping tumbling. A human judge stopped the clock at 7.72 seconds — or 0.28 away from a qualified ride. For scale, the blink of an eye is only 0.1 to 0.4 seconds.
Keeping hit the challenge button mounted on the chute.
If he was wrong, it would cost him $500, but if he was right, it could be worth up to $30,000 with a qualified ride and a chance to win the event.
For a challenge, PBR turned to multiple cameras and a replay official named Shawn Ramirez. He sat in a TV booth in the Enterprise Center and watched and re-watched to determine exactly when Keeping’s ride ended.
Ramirez’s analysis added 0.04 seconds to Keeping’s ride, leaving it still short at 7.76. Ramirez looked at the camera and gave a thumbs down — an old-school way of showing a decidedly new-school decision.
To his spot just off the dirt, Jordan brought with him an unusual combination of tools:
a headset, tablet, clipboard with a scoresheet, a re-ride flag, which he threw after a poor performance by the very first bull, and a handheld buzzer with a red button on top, which he used once when it appeared a rider’s hand touched the bull. That stopped the clock at 6.09 as the ride continued through the eight-second mark. Rider Lucas Divino challenged the ruling, and the instant replay showed no contact.
A bull ride is almost always portrayed as a competition between rider and bull, and it is. The bull is trying to throw the rider off, and he’s trying to stay on. However, descriptions of rides with the best scores make them sound like a dance, with the rider reacting to his partner’s moves. That’s why Crimber’s score was so high. The two were powerful together.
The bull often outpowers, outmaneuvers and outwits his opponent — and that’s when he draws big numbers. Mike’s Magic bucked off Thiago Salgado, pulling a laugh out of Jordan.
“Isn’t he a little jerk?” Jordan says, nodding toward Mike’s Magic. The sly grin on his face revealed he meant this as a high compliment. “As soon as he gets Salgado loose, he turns back. It’s a setup. He’s so smart.”
And that bovine brilliance was rewarded with a bull score of 45.75, one of the highest of the weekend.
While the strength of that performance was undeniable, plenty of rides fell into a gray area. For example, the six scores for Brady Fielder’s ride stretched from 83 to 88 — the difference between mediocre and good. Jordan counted himself on the low end of that spectrum. Jordan planned to use a PBR app to circulate a video of that ride among judges for further discussion, a tact he uses often. After Crimber’s monster 91.25-point ride, Jordan compared that ride to one the day before, for which Crimber was scored 89.25. The difference should have been even more, he says, and he’ll use that video, too.
“Today’s was much better, bull and rider,” he says. “We get to compare them because of our system.”
The post Behind The Score appeared first on Western Horseman.