Happy belated Birthday Bo
Hope Bo is smiling down on the program wherever he is.
Bo will ALWAYS be with us.
My hero. I could listen to him talk about the weather and be entertained.
Miss you, Bo.
Fantastic montage.
I liked that they played (from 3:52 onward) the full version of "The Victors," in which the first two stanzas repeat themselves, resulting in a greater musical buildup to the chorus. We don't hear that often enough at football/basketball games anymore. (The "full" version the MMB typically plays does not repeat the first two stanzas.)
You don't hear it that often because it takes forever to play. There aren't too many breaks in a game long enough to fit it in.
It is, however, played during every postgame show, every concert, and before every hockey game.
I don't buy that explanation. The song lasted 2:10 in the above clip and they weren't necessarily playing fast. Nowadays commercial breaks are often longer than that, especially between quarters. And they certainly could fit it in during the pregame performance. There is always some dead time between the end of the pregame performance and the entry of the players (even with the Pop Evil song and pregame video in there).
The difference between the "full" version that they do play regularly and this one is about 30 seconds. They could play the actual full version during a game. It seems to be a creative decision not to.
You're entitled to your opinion, but you're misguided for a number of reasons.
For the pregame performance, there actually is not enough time to play the full Victors. It's timed down to the second by people who actually know how these things go, not some guy in the stands with an MGoBoard account who thinks " well, they could if they wanted to." It's too long for the time the band is allowed to do the full compliment of things that they do. And there's no way to do anything before the team comes out of the tunnel anymore anyway (which used to be the rather popular Let's Go Blue thing) as there's a hype video that eats up almost every second of possible time.
The band has certain leeway to play things during commercial breaks, but remember, the director has a guy in his ear from Stadium Operations telling him when the MMB can and can't play, and there are certain things Athletics insists on doing during commercial breaks, like video and audio announcements, etc., which eat up the time the band gets to play. It's rare to get a break where there would be enough time to play the full Victors.
Last, the full version, as it is written on the page (over a hundred years ago) features a full run of the trio where the woodwinds alone take the melody. It's quiet, and frankly, a bit boring to the audience. Which is the case when it's played in postgame, in concert, and in the stands at other athletics events. Which is also why the shortened version not only omits this part, but also an extra repeat at the beginning for which 99.9% of the stadium doesn't know the words to sing along anyway. The full Victors is a lot of clapping, and not a lot of singing. In the football stadium, where everyone and their uncle is screaming for the band to be louder, good luck getting that to fly if the band indeed had long enough to fit it in.
I suppose if you feel so strongly about it, go ahead and call or email the MMB director, Scott Boerma. I'm sure he'd probably tell you the same things. There's a reason the MMB traditionally doesn't take requests, as the people making said requests often have no idea how and why the directors make the choices they do.
It was Bob Ufer's birthday too.......a happy MEEEEEEEEEEEEEchigan birthday birthday to him too.
I believe he would've been 92.