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March Madness begins, as the “First Four” play in Dayton to see who will advance into the first round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament.Now, it’s no secret that sports fans are geeks.  (Arcane knowledge, fannish clothing, cosplay, fan gatherings, undying loyalty even when stuff sucks, hatred of stuff that’s just a little bit different, fantasy battles, questionable hygiene,  dining etiquette…)

Of course, there is that subtle Venn diagram overlap of “wonks” and “sports statisticians” which comes to the fore during March Madness, as millions seek to find the perfect bracket to win the adulation of millions (or at least your office mates).

I admit… I follow the trivia… and I like the underdogs, or, this year, the anteaters.  (Sadly, the Banana Slugs of UC Santa Cruz are Division III.]

But what about other brackets?  Why should sports fans have all the fun?

For your enjoyment, we offer the following Geek brackets:

Star Wars

Two different brackets, one of which is official.

Who will join Obi-Wan and Yoda as champion?  StarWars.com has the official bracket!

Meanwhile, there’s a Jedi tournament going on, with each side to meet in the final!    Jedi vs Sith!

The annual Geek Madness Championship, for gamers:

Nothing But Comics hosts an Image-specific tourney:

TheNBC! staff has taken the top 64 Image books hitting the stands in March and broken them up into four divisions:“The Horror” – Marlon Brando Division, Whimsy Sci-Fi Division, Nihilist Sci-Fi Division and The Kitchen Sink Division.

While USA Today plays “Heroes and Villains“:

To settle that last question, we need your help. We’ve set up a 32-character bracket, as part of Bracket Madness month, and each day you can vote for your favorite character to advance to the next round. Votes will be tallied at midnight eastern time, and the winning character will advance to the next round.

…and Cosmic Comix & Toys in Cantonsville, Maryland, offers “Cosmic Madness 2015“!

Muppet Madness gets some major corporate sponsorship from a casino:

[WHAT?!  Big Bird v. Snuffie?]

The Disney Nerds Podcast hosts: MOVIE MADNESS 2015

Movie Qualifications:  Only full length first run features released by Walt Disney Studios or Pixar qualify.  No Direct to DVD or releases by other Disney owned studios.  Ranking was determined by a Disney Nerds Podcast Team.  This is YOUR personal favorite list, we are not asking for the most popular, the most artistic, the most awards, this is about the movie that you are most fond off for what ever reason it may be.  What is YOUR favorite Disney animated feature!!

The WDW Radio Blog is sponsoring a tournament to select the best attraction at WDW’s Magic Kingdom!

Want to pit various fandoms against each other?   Epic Nerd hosts a multi-franchise-fandom bracket!

Top seeds: Batman, Super Mario, Lord of the Rings, Star]Trek.   [Hmmm…anyone want to fanfic that team-up?]

A nine-member selection committee of the biggest nerds and geeks I could gather (myself included) examined franchises from the genres of fantasy & adventure, science-fiction, video games, and comics.

After evaluating them using four criteria: modern popularity, commercial success, historic importance, and artistic value, each franchise was ranked and seeded.

…and in a similar vein, which property should be rebooted?  (Or exhumed, in some cases.)

Go to UnderScoopFire and vote!

In another tourney, the finals!  What is the Greatest Geek Moment in History?  FastCompany spends less than a week running the tourney!

Star Wars, The Internet, Ada Lovelace, DNA?

Okay…  You probably need a break to get some refreshments…

Need to get into the spirit?  Perhaps some Kentucky rye to go with the Wildcats?  It’s MASH MADNESS!

Or maybe some brewskis?

How about hues instead of brews?

Or maybe some rhythms to go with those hues?

The Victory Formation hosts the Final 68: The Worst Things in Sports.  Media, Fans, Athletes, and Etcetera are the regionals.

Tired of basketball?  Playing out a 2015 March Madness Bracket of All 30 MLB Teams

Insider Higher Ed takes the NCAA bracket, and determines winners based on brains, not brawn!

It’s time once again to fill out those March Madness brackets, and what better way to predict the winner of this year’s National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s basketball tournament than to compare how the teams succeed in the classroom?

Here’s how Inside Higher Ed‘s bracket works: to determine the winners, we first look to the Academic Progress Rate, the N.C.A.A.’s multiyear measure of a team’s classroom performance. When two teams tie, we turn to the N.C.A.A.’s Graduation Success Rate, which measures the proportion of athletes on track to graduate within six years. In the event of a G.S.R. tie, we then turn to the Federal Graduation Rate, a slightly different formula that the government uses to track graduation rates.

This tournament’s championship round was a nail-biter, going into double overtime, with the teams tying on both the A.P.R. and the G.S.R.

…and then there are the Big Brains at Critical Theory who ponder the great question of our age: Of philosophy’s many personalities, which is most likely to ruin a sporting event?

Is it Diogenes, who rushes the field, rambling “I’m looking for an honest man!” while violently shaking Bill Belichick? Can that compare to the $8 hot dog ruined by Jacques Lacan who reminds you “the phallus is in the bun,” or Karl Marx’s multiple aborted attempts to retake the means to produce “the wave” for proletariat revolution?

Comics Should Be Good returns for their seventh annual 2015 DC/Marvel Comic Character Tournament!  This time, it’s cinematic characters, and actors!

Or maybe your prefer SUPER ANIMALS!

South Park has their “Bro Down”.

What’s the MOST 90s band?  (Not the best, but the one which best represents the 90s in music.)

Girls in Capes has their Sisterhood tournament.  Final Four!

io9 has their tournament.

For sports widows….  Leading men of romance novels:

Got a favorite program on National Public Radio?  KPCC offers a tournament!

ComicMix once again highlights webcomics!

TV Couples

Which TV should come back on the air?  Pushing Daisies, or Firefly?

Best TV Theme  [This is really disorganized.  “Scooby-Doo”?  Which one?!  Should have been better researched.]

Best Scripted Shows

…and my favorite bracket:

Tweet

Once again, it’s that time of year again!  Sports geeks speculate who will make the Big Dance, who got snubbed, and who will be the Cinderella Team this year.  Billions of dollars are wagered on the outcomes, as casual fans contemplate the 68 teams and fill out numerous brackets.

It’s not uncommon among comics fans to wonder, “Who would win in a fight, Forbush Man or ‘Mazing Man?”  (Neither.  Ma Hunkel would break it up and have them both over to the JSA mansion of cookies and milk.)  So it’s not inconceivable that fans would take that simple idea, and turn it into a tournament.  Who do you seed in each bracket?  How do you arrange the divisions?  Do you mix and match franchises and tribes?

Well, we here at Stately Beat Manor offer the following brackets as a community service, especially to fans of Gonzaga, New Mexico, and Kentucky.  (Your lack of faith was disturbing.  >choke<)

Comics

Let’s start with the big comic bracket: Mix March Madness over at ComicMix.com!  Those crazy kids are at it again, this year adding a new wrinkle!  You can BUY votes!  All money goes to The Hero Initiative, so put your money where your mouth is! 300 webcomics have been reduced to eight, and it’s getting competitive!  (This is the perfect opportunity to check out some new webcomics!)

The latest bracket (as of March 24, when I started this article):

	Ava’a Demon Game 1 Details Questionable Content
			Winner of 1 Game 5 Details Winner of 2
					Winner of 5 Game 7 Details Winner of 6
	xkcd Game 2 Details Sandra and Woo
	Girls With Slingshots Game 3 Details Bittersweet Candy Bowl
			Winner of 3 Game 6 Details Winner of 4
	A Redtail’s Dream Game 4 Details RomanticallY Apocalyptic

The final is open for voting!  Click to view, and to vote!

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Comics Should Be Good, an awesome blog over at Comic Book Resources, has suspended their annual superhero tournament in favor of notable story runs by creators!  Is Simone’s Secret Six better than Claremon’ts New Mutants?   Byrne’s Fantastic Four or Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme?  The Elite Eight (is that a superhero team?) can be voted on here!  (X-Men vs. X-Men!)

Cosmic Comix and Toys, a store in Cantonsville, Maryland, is hosting a female-centric tournament, and the final is a humdinger!  (One which I don’t think we’ve ever seen in comics, but which would be amazing if done right!)

Food

The Victory Formation does a different tournament each year.  This year, the fourth, is based all on Cereal!  The Elite Eight are in competition!

Multimedia

Princess Leia or Padme Amidala?  Tarkin or Count Dooku?  Boba Fett or Jango Fett?

Ooh!  I like the triads!  Population Go matches Western characters on the left, Asian characters on the left!

 

Once again, TheOneRing.net presents their tournament, this year concentrating on geography.  Top seeds: Galadriel, Smaug, The One Ring, and Balin.  The Elite Eight are here!

Wow….  IO9′s March TV Madness brackets are crazy!  Some would make for interesting crossovers, like ALF meeting Kirk!  Top seeds: Star Trek (TOS), X-Files, Doctor Who, The Twilight Zone!  The final has been announced!  And decided!  Not as close as some might expect!

(And in the separate, Whedon Invitational Tournament…

Buffy beat Dollhouse 81-19, while Firefly beat Angel 86-14.  Buffy got smacked down 64-36 in the final.)

The Dallas Morning News continues their annual Tournament of Books.  No, I haven’t read any of them (and haven’t heard of most), but we welcome all geeks here, and they win the prize for best design!

 Movie franchises!  Toy Story!  Star Wars! (I suspect that the judges ignored the prequels…)

This could easily be expanded into four brackets, separating the franchises by number of films made.  Add in some art films, animation, pre-war films, and it could get interesting!

Here is the stunning upset!

(There was also a Horror tournament last October.)

Awwww… TV couples!  Inside Pulse lets readers play match-maker with their massive tournament!  I’m hoping for Bobby and J.R. Ewing to win!  Third round voting can be done here.

Toys and Games

Tired of basketball?  BoardGameGeek has a tournament for games!  Top seed: Twilight Struggle.   The four finalists can be voted on here.  Lots of upsets!

Miscellaneous

 

Which retailer do you patronize?  Dappered.com lists Banana Republic and J. Crew are the top seeds.  (Amazon, 7th?  No Wal-Mart?  Macy’s #4?)

And finally, which style do you prefer?

The completed Battle of the Kids' Books brackets - including judges - have been published.  The first round is completely filled in.  And for the first time in three years I suddenly understand how the Battle team pairs the books up - in alphabetical order.  It is so simple, that it's brilliant.  Sometime, the books in a bracket have similarities but even that is an accident.  Sometimes, the books seem to have originated on two different spheres.  It just makes the judges' jobs that more complicated and their rationalizations that more enticing. 

Who makes up this team of diabolic Battle moderators?  Are they demons, like the Game Masters in Homeward Bounders, or mere mortals with brains, bent and gnarled by years of reading?  We might know their names but do we know them - their true selves?  I fear not.

And yet, we follow where they lead, into the arena.  (Cue martial music with lots of swords crashing on shields.)