Hey! Listen! That rumbling sound you hear in the distance is the sound of millions of Americans starting to care about brackets for about a week. You're probably one of them. You're probably filling out a bracket right now. You are probably entering at least twenty brackets into at least five different bracket pools. You've got your smart bracket, your dumb bracket, your homer bracket, your anti-homer bracket, your hater bracket, the bracket you filled out with your spouse, your coworker bracket, your other coworker bracket... Brackets everywhere. Brackets are fun!
Brackets are... dumb.
This contest, which appeared in an opium dream to Warden11 400 years ago, has no brackets. I don't know why it's called a bracket challenge. Warden11 just wrote down what the glowing basketball sang to him. Deal with it.
Here's the rules. PAY ATTENTION.
The Rules
1: Pick Ten Teams
For each tournament game a team of yours wins, you get a number of points equal to their seed. ** NEW RULE THIS YEAR ** If a team makes it to the Final Four, all their points are doubled. So if 4-seed Duke wins three games, taking them to the Elite 8, they have earned 4 * 3 = 12 points. If they win again, getting to the Final Four, they are worth 4 * 4 * 2 = 32 points, and then 8 points per game they win thereafter.
Note that that play-in games don't count as tournament games. They're not wins, and if you pick a play-in team and they lose before the tournament starts, your pick transfers automatically to the other play-in team. So even if you say "Wichita State", what that really means in game terms is, "The winner of Vanderbilt/Wichita State."