Kansas City Barbecue Society reveals what went wrong at the 2023 American Royal

Courtesy Janky Leg BBQ

After hiring a third-party IT firm to investigate some of the errors behind the scoring of the world’s largest barbecue competition, KCBS has opened up about mistakes that were made.

For those who are unfamiliar, David Ellis of Machete Boys BBQ was initially crowned open champions of the American Royal back in early October, before miscues were uncovered, ultimately naming Jordan Kirkpatrick of Janky Leg BBQ as champions of the open contest. 

On Tuesday, Oct. 24, KCBS released a comprehensive report and action plan regarding the situation. 

“We don’t see zeroes.”

One root of the issue stemmed from misconceptions within data entries, resulting in teams having scores of ‘zero’ when staff were reviewing results.

“At a KCBS contest, we don’t see zeroes. Zeroes mean something went wrong, but at the American Royal, which is definitely a one-of-a-kind event, over 20 teams didn’t check in or pick up their turn in containers,” KCBS CEO Rod Gray says.

“As they got further into it, there were zeroes for teams that they felt certain had turned in as well.”

This is where the stream of complications began for KCBS staff. 

The software that KCBS uses for all of its competitions is called “SCORE.” Gray explained that there is a known glitch that occurs rarely within the tabulation process. This glitch causes the software to hide data from certain entries, ultimately creating the zero scores that were seen for specific teams.

This issue occurs nearly once a year when KCBS is scoring various BBQ competitions. It just so happened to take place at the biggest annual barbecue event.

“Those two issues with zeroes showing up in the results, caused my tabulation team to lose confidence in the final reports,” Gray says.

After the staff’s loss of confidence, they began working to correct the missing results. Under a tight timeframe, Gray says that his tabulation team was experiencing an immense amount of stress, leading to errors when they were rekeying entries. 

“I think my staff did the best they could do under the pressure they were feeling.” 

Under the assumption that all results were corrected, they finalized their work and printed announcer copies. Once results were published on the following Monday afternoon, Gray and KCBS realized discrepancies between the results that were announced compared to the final report that they had released.

“That’s when we realized we had a problem.”

Tuesday morning, KCBS began conducting a complete audit of the contest. By Wednesday night, they had corrected the results and shared the information with the American Royal on Thursday morning.

Gray mentioned that he is confident that the stress level his team experienced was the main cause of the issue. He says this because they only found four errors between both the sausage and turkey smoke categories, which neither counts toward crowning a grand champion.

Among the other four categories that did count toward the open championship, there were a total of 103 cumulative keying errors: 46 in the pork category, 41 in the brisket category, 11 in the chicken category, and five in the ribs category, all of which had 480+ team entries.

“I think that the errors are higher in pork and brisket because it was getting later in the night,” Gray says.

There were also a few minor issues outside of the software glitch and errors within reentering the results.

One team gave the wrong number when turning in their barbecue to judges, which was actually the number of a team who paid and entered but did not show up for the competition. Another team turned in multiple boxes, resulting in them being scored twice in their database. One corporate team did not pick up their designated boxes, rather writing the number that they had thought their team was placed under on their own box and turned in their barbecue, leading to miscommunication.

“That causes the teams to question the validity of the results,” Gray says. “If we had a team that wasn’t there receive scores, whose scores are those? Where do those belong?”

Breaking the news

Gray mentioned that breaking the news to David Ellis, head of Machete Boys BBQ, was one of the toughest calls he has ever made. Although Gray let out words that were rough on Ellis’s ears, he was a good sport about the situation.

“David was unhappy, he was confused. The call lasted about ten minutes and by the end of the call, David was asking me how he could help make sure this never happens again. How he can physically be involved with helping us solve this and make sure it never happens again. Which is pretty incredible considering I just told him that he didn’t win a major barbecue contest,” Gray says.

While both Ellis and Kirkpatrick were stripped of certain experiences throughout this entire kerfuffle, their genuine barbecue gamesmanship has shined throughout the process. Both of the two joined Luke Darnell on his Pitmaster Podcast to discuss what they had gone through during the last month.

“Everything happens for a reason, right? In the grand scheme of things, we’re all human and we should treat each other with respect. And no, it’s no fault of Jordan and no fault of my own, so it doesn’t pay to go out there and have any other message than the messages we put out there,” Ellis said on the Pitmaster Podcast.

“I don’t really know how else you handle it. We can be pissy and throw a huge fit, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t change anything,” Fitzpatrick said on the Pitmaster Podcast. “It happened, we’re both affected by it. I think we can all agree that we just hope that something positive comes out of this, it gets addressed, we get the answers we want, and hopefully we can refrain from something like this ever happening again.”

This past Friday night, KCBS did the best that they could to salvage a celebration for Kirkpatrick and Janky Leg BBQ at this year’s Boo B Que event. They awarded Kirkpatrick the American Royal throne, confetti, and a $15,000 check in an attempt to restore the level of reception that he missed out on at the actual event.

Uncertain future and the few next steps

After partnering with the Royal for over 30 years, KCBS is uncertain whether or not they will be accepted back to judge future competitions, but are hopeful that they will.

“So far my working relationship with the American Royal has been amazing. They’ve been patient, they’ve been understanding, I couldn’t ask for a better partner,” Gray says.

Going forward, KCBS plans to continue using the same software that they are familiar with, but will implement tech support on standby for any future miscues. They are also going to change how they go about scoring while the event is ongoing, as well as eliminating any no-show teams from their database to ensure that there is no miscommunication on that end.

“I think we own this. I think we’ve apologized for this and we’ll continue to apologize. I for one am very sorry that it happened and the next step is to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Gray says.

With the industry standard software in operation, the warning flags of a known issue, and a slightly beefier tech team let’s year, we’re all hoping that 2023’s event goes down as a teachable moment rather than a food competition flub.