To offer a little bit of context here: On Tuesday of Championship Week, there were some weird little voting spikes. I honored the results, but I felt like I should do something to potentially right the ship, so to speak, and then I found that the total voting had yielded a great big cluster of similarly leveled idols and such right about where you’d expect to see a cutoff line in the actual NCAA tournaments.

Hence! We’re doing the First Four, just like in real life. This expands the field to 68 for a minute, but it gives us an opportunity to a) bring more competition and b) really mess with some presumptions about who might win this thing.

Go look at the Corenament preview if you need to; there’s one matchup per region here, and the winner of each will enter that region’s bracket as the #12 seed; if you follow the NCAA, you know that #12 can mean some very special things.

On to the vote! Continue reading →