This year's Men's Tournament had several surprises. Despite one of my Final Four teams in #2-seed Missouri losing in the first round, I correctly predicted the other three in Kentucky, Ohio State, and Kansas... including the national champion in Kentucky!
Bracket of Integrity : TwitPic | ESPN
Men's 2012 Tournament Bracket: ESPN | NCAA
Women's 2012 Tournament Bracket: ESPN | NCAA
But that doesn't end there...
Businesses of all sorts create their own brackets as a means of promotion for fans to vote for the best of something. It could be the best album, best food, best sports team, best anything. I've been tweeting several of these brackets I found over the past month (plus some thoughts on possible brackets), and here they are in summary.
WDRV 97.1FM in Chicago is a radio station dedicated to classic rock. On their website, they created an "Album Madness" bracket of 64 classic rock albums (randomly seeded) and asked listeners and fans to vote on each match-up daily. I created my own bracket which had Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, The Beatles' Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin's IV, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as my Final Four and Dark Side of the Moon besting Abbey Road in the Finals. Sure enough, two iconic Beatles albums made the Finals, Sgt. Pepper besting Abbey Road.
My Bracket: TwitPic
WDRV Results: WDRV | TwitPic
NFL.com created a bracket with the best 64 teams of all-time of the Super Bowl Era. The result after fan voting was deeming the 1976 Oakland Raiders team the best team in the history of the NFL (by a small margin).
NFL Bracketology: Website
The five city-specific websites of ESPN.com each have their own brackets for "Most Beloved" and "Public Enemy No.1" people in sports. As a result of fan voting, former Bulls legend Michael Jordan was voted the "Most Beloved" in Chicago over Walter Payton.
ESPN - "Most Beloved" (Chicago): Website
ESPN - "Public Enemy No. 1" (Chicago): Website
Chicago pizzeria Home Run Inn annually creates a bracket of their eight popular pizzas, and asks their customers to vote for the pizza they want a special discount for. Sausage is often the winner in these, including this year.
Home Run Inn - Pizzeria Madness: Facebook
Facebook has a number of games to play. The Games.com blog featured a set of 16 popular Facebook games and ask visitors to vote for the better game in each matchup.
Games.com - March Madness Facebook Game Faceoff 2012: Website
Other random thoughts on possible historic and future brackets:
Best Progressive Rock Album. Proposed #1 seeds include King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, a Yes album, and a Jethro Tull or Genesis or Rush album.
Best Family Movie. As a family, we watch a multitude of movies together. A possible Amazon.com Listmania project was the best movies we each give a score from 1-10, 10 being a family favorite. If a bracket were to be made from these movies, the definitive four #1 seeds would be Ocean's Eleven (2001 remake), Disney's Aladdin (1992), Back to the Future (1985), and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).
Best Comic Strips: What are the best newspaper comic strips in all of history? Peanuts? Dick Tracy? Blondie? Gasoline Alley? Garfield? What seed would the short-lived classic Calvin and Hobbes have?
Best Mathematical Milestone: World-renown mathematician Clifford Pickover wrote The Math Book which details 250 milestones in the history of mathematics. A proposal would be to pick the best 64 milestones and match them up to determine the most important mathematical milestone. Would the discovery of Calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz (c. 1665) take it all?
Mount Rushmore. The four U.S. Presidents represented on this national monument could be considered the Final Four as a result of a bracket of Presidents being "played out." In historical context, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln could be considered #1 seeds. If Theodore Roosevelt wasn't a #1 seed, what #1 seed President did he best in his section of the bracket?
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