Long live the amazing, do-it-all bracket
Posted: Thursday, April 03, 2008 8:29 PM
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March Madness
March Madness’ lasting impression on the world isn’t the teams vying for the title. It isn’t the memorable moments of buzzer-beaters, upsets, great games or the coaches.
It’s the bracket. The amazing, all-purpose, not-used-often-enough bracket.
The 64-team bracket is more than just a way to determine the men’s and women’s college basketball NCAA champion, it’s invaded nearly every aspect of pop culture. Whenever there’s a large group of characters or shows, bracketing the field is a sure-fire crowd pleaser.
The Washington Post’s “Lost” Madness pitted characters from the TV show against each other, then had fans vote to eventually choose the champ. (Spoiler alert! Desmond won!)
Radio stations pit bands against each other on air, like in this bracket for the best rock band of the last four decades. (Zepplin’s the top seed for the ‘70s, with U2 in the ‘80s, Nirvana in the ‘90s and Radiohead for the ‘00s. How the Cure beats U2 I have no idea.) Some radio stations don’t stick to music, either.
Another fine example is the Big Lead's Culture Bracket. (NOTE: Added this later. How it escaped the first list is beyond me.)
Even when the topic relates to college hoops, it doesn’t have to be dependent on game results.
North Carolina made the Final Four in this bracket from Inside higher Ed, but Davidson cut down the nets. (Cinderella lives!) It used the APR from each team (an NCAA method of assessing academic performance) and played ‘em off. The Final Four? UNC, Davidson, Belmont and Cornell.
This bracket used a similar theme: predicting March Madness winners by the median salary of the school’s graduates. The winner? Stanford, and it’s not even close. The Cardinal’s $113,000 median salary blew away Georgetown, Duke and Notre Dame in this year’s field.
I love this stuff. My brother and I used to bracket whatever we were into that month (TV shows, action movies, cartoons from childhood) and send each other the bracket. Our winners were never the same.
A couple of years ago, I worked on a comedy bracket (badly in need of updating) and would’ve done more movie and TV categories, but focused on sports instead.
Last year’s “Enlightened Bracketologist” hit on this theme brilliantly for an entire book. It pitted everything from TV shows to inventions to writers against each other, bracketed and played out by “experts” in related fields. Excellent reading if you haven’t grabbed already.
Essentially, you can live your life this way. The crew at the BracketBoard sums it up well. When a problem comes along, you must bracket.
