March Madness Brackets Announced -- SUPER March Madness

Ok, here's where we stand on March Madness at Free Money Finance and what I've done about it:

• GREAT RESPONSE!!!!! I had 114 entries submitted. Thanks to all who submitted!

• I started going through them all to pick the best 64 and realized that doing so was going to be a nightmare -- there are just too many factors to consider when deciding on that many posts at once. So here's what I did: I made the brackets into an additional round -- a set of brackets that allowed for 128 posts -- and added in 14 byes with the 114 posts to complete it. In other words, every post that was submitted made it! Congrats to all.

• Now that I have an extra round, I need a series of extra posts. So I'll post a ton of "games" this week in order to get us down to 64 posts by next Monday.

• The complete bracket is linked below in an Excel spreadsheet. It contains the name of the post on the appropriate bracket line and the URL to that post directly under the post name. It's a bit hard to read in the first round, but will be easier as time goes on.

• The numbers on the left of each bracket are simply for my reference -- they are not seeds. In fact, all posts were placed randomly -- not seeded by "quality" or "chance of winning." It's entirely the luck of the draw.

• In the first few rounds, I will not be giving my reasons for why one post wins over another -- there are just too many posts to cover to do that. (you can see the criteria I'll be using listed in this post.) But I may add commentary as we get down to the final 16 or so. FYI -- I'll rely heavily on the comments to select a winner, so if your favorite post doesn't win and you were silent, you have no one to blame but yourself. ;-)

• Be sure to comment as often as you can/like so you have more chances to win a free book.

Good luck to all the participants!

Download fmf_march_madness_brackets.xls

Comments

[jim]

This is brilliant!

[My Financial Journey]

Yes very cool. Looks like a ton of work to setup, but it will be a blast seeing how this plays out.

Alright now who's starting the pickem pools based on this bracket ;-)

[raising4boys.com]

This is pretty cool. I'm excited.

[efipo.com]

Good stuff FMF. I've never seen a bracket system using excel before. Maybe I should of stayed awake in Computer Applications 3100...

[Ben]

Watch out Nickel or NCN, here I come! I guess I'm guaranteed to get at least one post past the first round because two of my articles play each other. Talk about diversification!