Hello friends! Are you ready to Corenament?

‘Tis the season not for snow and pudding and snow and caroling, but for idols to vie for the title of Best Idol. Last year’s Corenament was different, sure, but it was also … rudimentary. Straightforward. Easily manipulated. Frustrating for me! So we’re going to do it differently this time around.

The Corenament takes its inspiration from the NCAA basketball tournaments (but not the stupid NIT), in which 68 teams (pared to 64 for the actual bracket) go through single-elimination hell on the way to the legendary Final Four and the crowning of a champion. Last year’s Corenament was satisfied with 16 entries, and that’s just silly, because we can do way better than 16 at this point.

Like the Tournament, entrants will be a combination of “conference” champions and at-large bids; like the Tournament, we’ll use seedings to determine the shape of the bracket. Like the Tournament, there will definitely be upsets galore and heartbreaking collisions between beloved programs. And, just like the Tournament, people are going to get mad about seedings and stuff!

It’ll be great!

So here’s how it’s going to go down:

I’ve taken just about everything that’s ever appeared on ye olde Homicidols.com and broken it out into reasonably sensible “conferences.” The idea there is to gather likes with likes, more or less, with a very college basketball-like uneven distribution of talent and some randomization to take into account how things like weird bounces, freakish injuries and recruiting scandals can throw a wrench into any otherwise flawless system.

The NCAA conference tournaments have in some cases already begun, but the big kids are on next week, which is when we’re going to do the same. Except, because we have way fewer conferences than the NCAA and need to limit the at-large entries somewhat, we’re going to give automatic bids to the regular season champions of each conference in addition to the “tournament” winners, and then use the regular season standings plus tournament results to determine the pecking order for the at-large bids. Also, the conferences are not evenly weighted on purpose, because screw fairness, this is war.

Make sense? PROBABLY NOT!

Anyway, here are your conferences at the end of the regular season, with standings determined by Kerrie’s famous Hunger Games simulator.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t know what to do with Kamen Joshi, but they’re getting an automatic bye into the final field by dint of having won last year, and that seed will be determined somewhat randomly.

The conference tournaments begin on Monday and will be staggered throughout the week to keep things from being completely stupid. The final field will be revealed on Sunday, March 12, and opening-round competition will begin that Wednesday.

These won’t be straight-up popularity contests, either; we’ll find all kinds of screwed-up ways to get the best idols of a particular conference into the correct pecking order, don’t you worry — songs, videos, albums, who’d beat who in a fight, etc.

Hold on to your butts. This is about to get stupid.

*I had originally left out liNGliNG, which was an oversight as opposed to a deliberate choice; at Richard’s suggestion on Twitter, she’s in the Character Counts Conference, with her place determined by me running her through a matchup simulator until she won three in a row. Good job, liNGliNG!