Harve started off like a ball of fire when he came on tour last year and then he got in a terrible slump and he couldn't ride anything, but he was riding everything. He had a bunch of 90-point rides right off the bat as soon as he got on tour last year and then he got in such a slump to where he couldn't ride a spinner.

He had to work his way back on tour.

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Keep in mind these bulls don't have to show up every week. As a matter of fact, they're managed very well to where they only perform once every couple of weeks, at the very most. Their travel is very limited because the stock contractors don't want any stress of any kind on these bulls.

If they have a poor out, unlike a cowboy, then they're going to go back to the minor leagues and prove themselves again or gain some confidence.

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Three things can happen with the race for the World Championship: somebody can just get on an incredible roll and in the next four events place in the Top 3, but anybody doing that besides Marchi is highly, highly unlikely.

Another thing would be to hope Marchi falls off all of his bulls at the Finals, but, once again, it's highly, highly unlikely and somebody would have to have a runaway Finals of their own.

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For those of you who didn't get to see the show on Sunday one of the things we did was that we all came up with our biggest surprise on the year. Mine was the amount of 90 point rides. Just after halfway there are 88 and we only had 73 over all of last year.

That is just incredible.

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A story that won't be picked up by a lot of people, but I mentioned during the telecast, and that is: North Star, Far North and Northern Chill – all in the Ford Championship round – are all full brothers born the same year out of the same cow.

They're flush mates and what that means is there was a cow that was stimulated to super ovulate, which means put out more eggs than just one and was artificially inseminated.

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I could feel the energy from Mike Lee when he came up to that podium. I had a feeling he was going to pick White Magic. You could literally feel it. This guy was revved up and could not wait to pick White Magic.

A lot of people may not realize this, but Mike was born in Billings and had a lot of family there, and so another great storyline was when he rode what was probably the leader for bull of year.

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During the telecast I was really hoping that the national media would pick up on how big of a story this is with Zack Brown. Three years ago he got his guts stomped out, was in intensive care for weeks and it was really scary.

I don't think we talked about just how serious that was for him, the recovery period and then the retirement for two years before he came back to bull riding. I just thought it was huge that in the same arena where he was nearly killed, he came back won nearly $40,000.

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Even when we don't have the top guys involved in the race for the world championship – Marchi, Lostroh or even McBride, because he's hurt – it's always great to see guys who have struggled grab the headlines. Luke Synder and Ross Coleman have done it and now the next guy is Brian Canter.

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I was glad to see Adriano Moraes do well and I want to apologize to anybody who wins the go round with the short go the same day.

In other words, Adriano wins go round number two but on television we're setting up for the short go so the winner of that round gets lost because we're looking at who has what bull and who's the leader on two (and not so much at who wins the go round).

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I've said this before, but it's always fun to drive even though it's six-hour drive to Omaha. It's not that I hate flying, but anytime I don't have to fly I like to take advantage of that because I hate crowds of people at the airport security lines.

Well, hate's kind of a harsh word, but it is kind of nice to get out on the road and I consider that a home game.

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