Comeback couples: biggest early-to-late jumps
Biggest surge: Iman Shumpert S30 Δ +3.94 (early 5.75 → late 9.69); 271 long-running arcs.
Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)
Headline
The largest early→late surge in the dataset belongs to Iman Shumpert & Daniella Karagach (S30), climbing from 5.75 in the first two weeks to 9.69 in the final two (Δ +3.94). We measure 271 couples who lasted into week 6 or later.
Top comebacks
| Season | Celebrity | Pro | Early | Late | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | Iman Shumpert | Daniella Karagach | 5.750 | 9.688 | 3.938 |
| 28 | Ally Brooke | Sasha Farber | 6.000 | 9.917 | 3.917 |
| 29 | Nelly | Daniella Karagach | 5.667 | 9.417 | 3.750 |
| 29 | Johnny Weir | Britt Stewart | 6.000 | 9.667 | 3.667 |
| 28 | Kel Mitchell | Witney Carson | 6.000 | 9.667 | 3.667 |
| 35 | Connor | Rylee | 5.000 | 8.625 | 3.625 |
| 1 | Kelly Monaco | Alec Mazo | 5.000 | 8.600 | 3.600 |
| 35 | Harry | Jenna | 6.500 | 10.000 | 3.500 |
| 32 | Mauricio | Emma | 4.500 | 7.875 | 3.375 |
| 34 | Dylan | Daniella | 5.833 | 9.167 | 3.333 |
Methods & caveats
Early = mean judge score in weeks 1–2; late = mean in the couple’s last two weeks. Couples with max week < 6 excluded. Selection bias: only survivors appear.
Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).
Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.
Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.
Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.
Downloads
Quarto source, rendered report, chart exports (PNG/SVG), and the analysis CSV.
