Monster Jam 2017 Tampa

Saturday night Ron & I along with our friends Damon & Sarah attended the Tampa 1 show of Monster Jam. I knew in advance only one of my favorite drivers, Becky McDonough in El Toro Loco would be performing. All the hype for this show was surrounding Dennis Anderson in Grave Digger going head-to-head with his son Ryan Anderson in Son-uva Digger.

We arrived at Raymond James Stadium later than planned due to a bad wreck on the Howard Franklin Bridge. I had to wait about 15 minutes in the Will Call line to pick up our tickets so we could enter the stadium. By the time we headed to our seats the first round of racing had begun and El Toro Loco was in round one so I totally missed her racing because Barbarian beat her :-(. Our seats were in the corner of the south end zone which gave us a different, less desirable view than we have had from sideline seats in the past.

The racing continued, Grave Digger lost a wheel and the finals were Iron Outlaw vs Son-uva Digger, with Son-uva Digger posting the win. The wheelies competition was new-to-us and only some of the trucks took part. This is the part of the show where we realized how unfair the Monster Jam scoring is. This is from the Monster Jam website:

A panel of audience members who view the competition and assign a value to the performance. Each judge can score from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). Once scores are reported, the highest score and lowest score are disregarded. The total of the scores is the score for the competition. In the event of a tie, the highest high score dropped will be the first tiebreaker. If still tied, the highest low score dropped will become the tiebreaker. If it is still tied, a tiebreaking official will break the tie to determine a winner.

At this particular show, judge #2 aka “the bald guy” was obviously not judging fairly. Trucks that wrecked got higher scores than trucks who completed the wheelies. These discrepancies continued throughout the freestyle competition as well. Granted, the high and low score from the panel of 5 judges is thrown out, judge #2’s scores skewed the overall scoring. If I were a driver, I wouldn’t want my winning or losing to be based on biased fan scoring, would you? Wrecking Crew won the wheelies competition with a score of 27.

Next up is our favorite part of Monster Jam, the freestyle competition. The drivers have 2 minutes to do as many tricks as possible in their 10.5 feet tall, 10,000 pound truck. On this particular night only one truck lasted the entire 2 minutes, and he is the only one who completed a backflip and that was Coty Saucier in the Monster Energy truck.

Overall, we had fun at Monster Jam, as always. If you missed this first show in Tampa Monster Jam returns to Raymond James Stadium on February 4th, tickets are on sale now.