Behind The Score
The crowd rose in anticipation, cheering louder with each buck, spin and kick. When the 8-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 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 moreso given his decades of experience exulting in bull-riding’s exquisite details. But he didn’t have time to celebrate. He had to submit a score for Crimber’s ride. He turned quickly to his tablet, tapped on a number, and scribbled the same down on a piece of paper.
Only after he did that did Jordan turn to me and marvel at what he had just witnessed — outstanding performances by the bull and the rider that combined created high theater. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
Whiskey Trip skipped, hopped, twisted and reversed direction. That usually messes with a rider’s balance and throws him off. But Crimber stayed loose, and by staying loose, he stayed in command of the ride. “That kid is riding so good,” Jordan said.
And the score — 91.25 — reflected that.
That’s a simple number, but the method to create it, and report it to the masses, was complex.
Allan Jordan spent decades riding bulls and even longer judging bull rides. Photography by Matt Crossman
Judging in PBR combines AI 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, and PBR offered me a chance to sit with Jordan during the Unleash the Beast event in St. Louis for an unprecedented inside look at how a score becomes a score.
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 8-second buzzer to the never-ending debate about what score a qualified ride deserves, and why it deserves it.
For the whole event, Jordan stood in essentially a photographer’s pit to the right of the chutes as you’re facing them. What’s that old saying about an event so exciting you only need the edge of your seat? He didn’t have a seat at all. He got one for me, but I didn’t use it.
I knew scoring happened fast. I didn’t know how fast. After Crimber’s ride and every other one that day, the 8-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 upon 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. Ninety is the barrier at which a good ride becomes great.
A bull is graded on bucks, kicks, spins, intensity and power. A rider is scored on matching/countering 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. One judge might see a bull’s spin and be blown away while another shrugs. Throughout the day, Jordan told me his scores. Sometimes he was lower than the aggregate score, sometimes he was higher, sometimes he was right on.
A couple times, when his scores varied from the group’s, he predicted so ahead of time and offered educated guesses as to why others saw it differently. 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. I can confirm: A bull ride looks more gnarly, more hard core, more did you see that?!? when it’s right in your face.
That’s why it’s important to have judges sprinkled across the arena. 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 sports is arguing about it.
That’s OK for fans, not for riders. You 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.”
Sure, sometimes they grumble behind the scenes. It’d be weird if they didn’t. While there is room for difference of opinion among judges, riders, fans and media, there is not 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. If you frequently score an 85-point ride at 90, or vice versa, you’re not going to last long at the Unleash the Beast level. If you are too often the lowest or highest of the six judges, that won’t work either. Nor will giving every ride an 86.
Jordan keeps track of “misses,” and a judge who accumulates too many gets demoted to lower-level events to refine their work. It used to be a good ol’ boy got chosen to judge the PBR Finals. Now only judges with the best records get invited. PBR’s top level events draw from a pool of roughly two dozen judges. For lower-level events, that number is about 130.
Within seconds of a qualified ride, the judge has to submit scores for both bull and rider. Photography by Matt Crossman
Jordan holds himself to the same high standards, if not higher, and told me unprompted about his own misses the night before. “Everybody’s going to screw up,” he 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.
But PBR has taken steps to correct errors when possible. In recent years, leagues across the sports spectrum have increasingly turned to technology to improve their officiating. The NFL has had instant replay for decades. In baseball, some leagues use cameras to determine balls and strikes, and that technology may eventually reach the big leagues. 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.
And PBR, too, 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.
Keeping stayed on Baldy through multiple jumps and spins. But Baldy’s late change of direction sent Keeping tumbling. A human judge stopped the clock at 7.72 seconds—or .28 away from a qualified ride. That is so, so close: The blink of an eye is only .1 to .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 because he would get a qualified ride and that ride would have given him 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.
The crowd watched that process play out on the big screen, which took Jordan’s desire for transparency to a whole new level. Ramirez’s analysis added .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.
A tablet to submit his scores.
A clipboard with a scoresheet, upon which he wrote his scores.
A re-ride flag, which he threw after a poor performance by the very first bull; other judges threw their flags, too.
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 8-second mark. Rider Lucas Divino challenged the ruling, and an instant replay, conducted much like Keeping’s challenge, showed no contact.
Jordan offered passionate commentary throughout, exulting over great bucks and stellar kicks and whiplash spins and delighting in rides that were equal to those moves. 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.
But 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.
Often, though, the bull outpowers, outmaneuvers, and outwits his opponent—and that’s when he draws big numbers. Jordan laughed in awe after Mike’s Magic bucked off Thiago Salgado. Behind Jordan, Mike Johnson, an apprentice judge who sat behind Jordan, swore in amazement.
“Isn’t he a little jerk?” Jordan said, nodding toward Mike’s Magic. The twinkle in his eye and sly grin on his face revealed he meant this as a high compliment. He was paying the bull a compliment by insulting it. “As soon as he gets Salgado loose, he turns back,” he says. “It’s a setup. He’s so smart.”
And that bovine brilliance was rewarded with a 45.75, one of the highest scores of the weekend.
While the strength of that performance was obvious and undeniable, plenty of rides fell into a gray area. The six scores for Brady Fielder’s ride, for example, stretched from 83 to 88—the difference between mediocre and good. Jordan counted himself on the low end of that spectrum. “Me and you can ride that bull,” he said.
Jordan planned to use a PBR app to circulate 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 said, and he’ll use that video, too, to spark discussion among his crew. “Today’s was much better, bull and rider,” he said. “We get to compare them because of our system. They’ll see it and go, ‘heck, yeah!’”
Which is pretty much exactly what the crowd said, from the top of their lungs, as they stood and clapped.
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