For the past 25 or 30 years, people have been speculating about how bull riding in the PRCA or the PBR is better or worse than the other and what today's bull riders should do and on and on. For the most part these are political arguments. People have strong allegiances to (or grievances against) one organization or another and the discussions on the subject often resemble discussions about any umpire's call at any little league baseball game.
But, it is definitely possible to quantify the actual differences between competing in one or the other. If you are an active bull rider, this is useful for you to know, if you want to be as successful as you have the potential to be.
As to whether one or the other organization is better than the other, that's a matter of taste. If you are a pro level bull rider of average ability, they are both probably more or less indifferent to your existence. If you are exceptionally successful, they will probably both court you to some extent. I tend to think in terms of the overall sport of bull riding, which includes both organizations. They have fundamental differences, but both of them have made dumb decisions at times, and both of them have taken actions that help bull riders as well. It is not like one of them is morally superior to the other - like the Vatican vs Epstein Island.
For those of you who are not old enough to remember, the PBR has undeniably made the sport better by just existing. Before the PBR, it was not unheard of for major PRCA rodeos to feature entire perfs full of bulls that came straight from the sale barn the day before, and went back to the sale barn at the end of the rodeo. The PRCA was mostly indifferent to this, though bull riders were not. The original idea of the PBR, which was - why not make some effort to use bulls that are at least good enough to win something on - revolutionized all of bull riding. To the point where today, the sport of bull riding is fundamentally different than it was in 1985. Bulls that are too weak to win anything on have been weeded out for the most part - pretty much everywhere. If you hate everything the PBR has ever done, you'd be a fool to hate the fact that the influence of the PBR has pretty much wiped out substandard bulls in the PRCA. UNLESS, I guess, your jam is paying $200 in entry fees to go 62 points 4 times in a month. It's hard to get that kind of action now.
Back to the basic differences between competing in one vs the other, here we go. There are a couple of basic facts about bull riding that should be obvious to everyone.
1: some bulls are harder to ride than others
2: some riders are better at staying on bulls than others.
If you have seen Jim Sharp or Bushwacker, you know the truth of this.
It follows that there is a hierarchy of bulls and another of riders. It is not hard to map this out. Even mostly ignoring how bulls get scored, it is pretty easy to figure out how hard bulls are to ride, once they have been around a while - based on how good they are at bucking riders off and how good they are at bucking good riders off. The same goes for riders, it is not hard to rank them on how good they are at staying on bulls and how good they are at staying on difficult bulls.
For the purposes of keeping it simple, lets consider that at any event or group of events we can divide the bulls into 3 levels of difficulty like this:
1: the top of the hierarchy. These are bulls that range from near unrideable (Magic Potion, Nighthawk) to bulls that are almost always PBR UTB short rounders, or the toughest 2 NFR rounds, and so on. There are around 25 guys in the past two decades who managed to ride these bulls >30% of the time. At the top of the list is Jose Vitor Leme who for his entire career is riding 49% against them.
2: Mid-range bulls. These range from the nicer UTB short round bulls, down to the average difficulty of a UTB long round bull or the average difficulty of a bull selected for the NFR. Over 20+ years, 136 guys have ridden them at >30%, 47 at >40%, 10 at >50 and three riders at the top are over 60% - McBride, Leme, and Marchi. Bulls in this this group can dominate average to below average riders, then turn around and get dominated by the top guys.
3: Anything that is easier to ride than the average PBR long round bull, or the average NFR bull. This includes some bulls that are simply untested, or haven't faced enough high quality riders to earn a higher grade. There are 692 pro bull riders who rode this group over 30% of the time, 207 who rode them >50% of the time, and 75 guys who rode them >60% of the time. JVL is also at the top of this rider list at 77%
There is one caveat to this - if you rank bulls by difficulty solely on their record, there will be the occasional bull in the #1 category that will give you 68 points if you stay on because he sucks but he's miserably hard to stay on. There aren't that many of those bulls around today, but my method for filtering them out is incorporating their average marking into their rating. So the occasional hunk of junk described above will be in with the 3's and his difficulty underestimated. But these bulls are pretty rare and irrelevant to the overall scheme.
Once bull difficulty is mapped out, then for any event, group of events, or year, etc we can simply count how many outs belong to each level of bull, which gives you a good picture of what to expect.
We can also dump the riders into two categories. The top ~1/3rd, and the bottom ~2/3. This makes it easier to evaluate bull difficulty and works for riders because they aren't nearly as numerous as bulls.
So back to PRCA vs PBR. I pulled a set of data that goes back through 2005, so roughly 21 years worth of bull riding in both associations, and here's what I found.
63,510 PBR UTB Outs
6,873 PBR Teams Outs
141,870 PBR lower level event Outs
195,786 PRCA Outs
Level 1 Bulls - the most difficult
PRCA - 11.32% of outs and are ridden 10.7% of the time.
PBR (non-UTB) - 13.15% of outs - ridden 11.2% of the time
PBR Teams: 32.23% of outs - ridden 19.9% of the time
PBR-UTB: 40.04% of outs - ridden 20.7% of the time
Level 2 Bulls - mid-range
PRCA - 29.55% of outs and are ridden 16.5% of the time.
PBR (non-UTB) - 30.13% of outs - ridden 16.9% of the time
PBR Teams: 37.79% of outs - ridden 36.9% of the time
PBR-UTB: 33.54% of outs - ridden 35.7% of the time
Level 3 Bulls - easiest
PRCA - 59.13% of outs and are ridden 30.9% of the time.
PBR (non-UTB) - 56.73% of outs - ridden 30.8% of the time
PBR Teams: 29.99% of outs - ridden 53.2% of the time
PBR-UTB: 26.41% of outs - ridden 51.6% of the time
So, if you are going to get on 100 bulls in a year of pro level competition, if you go solely to PRCA rodeos, you can expect to draw a #1 bull way less often than if you went PBR-UTB all year. In this scenario for every ten bulls you get on at rodeos, six of them will be #3 and only one of them will be #1
If you look at the top riding percentages for each difficulty level, they are dominated by PBR guys, but there are some guys in each who primarily rodeo.
Level 1: Joe Frost(12th), Matt Austin (15th), Stetson Wright (20th)
Level 2: Matt Austin (6th), Sage Kimzey (17th), Zack Oakes (18th)
Level 3: Sage Kimzey (3rd), Stetson Wright (6th), BJ Schumacher (7th), Bobby Welsh (8th), Joe Frost (10th), JW Harris (14th), Matt Austin (16th)
One thing that stands out in this data set is that the PRCA has long been ripe for someone who can really ride to step in and dominate. You can see where this has happened again and again over the years with Matt Austin, JW Harris, Cody Teel, Ky Hamilton, Sage, Stetson, and others. What these riders have in common is that they consistently stay on the 3's and ride a respectable percentage of the 1's and 2's - very much like the top PBR guys, but because of bull distribution shown above they don't see as many of the 1's
This is further illustrated when you look at straight riding percentages in the PRCA - ignoring bull difficulty. There are only 12 riders who have a long term >48% riding percentage in the PRCA from the 2005 season to now, and those 12 riders have a combined 64 NFR qualifications - averaging 5+ NFR's each. Seven of those guys are responsible for 18 of the last 20 gold buckles. That's Kimzey, Harris, Wright, Harris, Schumacher, Teel, and Hamilton. What this small group of guys have in common is that they are all good enough to compete at a high level in the PBR as well.
From a bull rider's perspective what path you should take kind of depends on your ability, which is one of the great things about bull riding - it all really comes down to your ability to ride.
If you are outstanding at the level 3 bulls and really struggle at the 1's and 2's, then the UTB is going to be a slog and you will need luck to win. It will be easier to find success in the PRCA. There are downsides to this, though. It is really easy to get in a groove of going to rodeos and reach a point where you are not really improving. You aren't getting on the higher level bulls as often, you are winning "enough" on the 3's and there just isn't an obvious, glaring incentive to get better at staying on the more difficult bulls. If you reach the NFR, you are looking at 10 rounds where the 2/3rds of the bulls are 1's and 2's and your best hope is to draw in the bottom end of difficulty every single round. Probably not going to happen. This makes the NFR bull riding fairly predictable most years because there are usually riders who qualify but aren't competent enough on the kind of bulls that will be there.
No matter where you go, it is in your best interest to improve your game against the more difficult bulls - and that is likely to mean getting on them more often, being more critical of any flaws in your riding at any level, and so on. AND, it is important that you get started on that immediately, because careers are short in bull riding. If you are hopelessly infatuated with rodeos, love everything about Ranch HQ, and crave getting fined for things you didn't even know were a thing, your life will STILL be vastly more enjoyable if you are better able to handle the more difficult bulls when you encounter them. And if you get competent at staying on them, you can easily dominate. If your goal is to end up among the small group of riders who have dominated the PRCA for two decades, then your implicit goal is that you want to be good enough to win in the PBR UTB or Teams level, whether you think that way or not.
People love to diss the PBR for various reasons, but one positive thing about it is that it is a crucible for refining good bull riders into better ones. You pretty much have to get good on the harder-to-ride bulls (just as it was in the PRCA prior to the mid-90's), and there are a bunch of individual examples of this happening. PBR Teams is an interesting middle ground too, because the bulls are more equally distributed by difficulty and on top of that you have a whole organization behind you - willing to do whatever it takes to see you improve and succeed. A number of high profile riders have noticeably improved their game since the Teams Series started.
I mentioned earlier that overall riding percentage leaders for all 3 levels of bulls are mostly dominated by guys who spent a lot of time at PBR events. There's a sound reason for that - the distribution of bull power at the highest PBR levels forces riders out if they don't improve on more difficult bulls. They are left with a pool of guys who can really ride. If those guys decide to go to rodeos whenever possible they will win.
And here's another way to think about all this. If you manage to qualify for the NFR or the PBR Finals, and you show up woefully unprepared for that level of bull and get your ass handed to you the whole week, it's somewhat bad for the sport. Not the end of the world, just "meh". On the other hand, if more riders take on the challenge of getting good enough to be competitive on PBR UTB or NFR level bulls, then those events benefit, and the whole sport benefits. If enough riders do that, then the next thing you will see is more money, more opportunities, more high profile, big money events. Right now, there are a lot of events that go downhill or don't even get to the planning stage because of a lack of competent riders. If you want the pro level organizations to be more accommodating to bull riders, that is much easier to achieve if the bull riders are strong, competitive and thereby more valuable to those pro organizations. The era of bull riding that gave birth to the BRO, PBR, CBR, Xtreme Bulls and so on was absolutely dominated by the riders instead of the bulls. Riders went anywhere there was money to be won, and cleaned house. Right now, riders are on the wrong side of this meme and need to flip the script. You can't flip the script by trying to duck 66% of the bulls in the sport.
