Arizona's Best Pronghorn Units

Unit 10 Again!

I've been working on a new ranking system for Arizona trophy pronghorn units.

As always, the key factors are fawn survival rate, health, weather, and genetics. Each unit is given a ranking from 0 to 20. The only unit to ever receive a ranking of 20 was 19A in 2008. My data only gives me rankings back to 2006, so take that for what it's worth. If we went back to the mid-90's I'm sure 19A would have had a ranking in the 40-50 range!

With this new ranking system, we can compare a unit against another unit in a different year.

For instance, 18A ranked 14th last year and 14th this year, but now I've given each unit a "Unit Score". With this Unit Score we can see that even though the ranking of 18A is the same as last year the Unit Score in 2014 was 1.4 and this year it has dropped to 0.9. Judging from what I saw in photographs 18A should have ranked a little higher than 14th which shows us the limitations of a system such as this.

I'm going to post the complete list of Unit Scores from 2006 to 2015. You'll notice that some of the scores don't coincide perfectly with my published pieces from last year or the year before. That's because the ranking formula has been updated and simplified. Note that this doesn't automatically make it better, just a little different and easier for me to update. 

Also note that 1.5 is an average score and I believe that any unit with 1.0 or better shouldn't be overlooked. 

The list below is ranked based on the 2015 Unit Scores.

Some observations:

1. Unit 10 projects to be the best Arizona unit since 19A in 2010. 
2. Unit 8 kind of crept up on us. There was a 95 inch buck killed there last year. My old ranking system had Unit 8 ranked 7th last year. The new ranking system would have ranked Unit 8 second last year. 
3. 13A shows some bizarre behavior, namely 2008. The photo below was from a buck killed in 2008. The buck was taken by Sam Dosey and was over 90 inches.

I'll do some more analysis and see if I can locate better cutoffs for what's good and what's not. Right now it's all based against averages as a whole.

If anyone has any thoughts about the rankings let me know in the comments below.