First, being MD-PhD students (Steve recently matched, by the way, while Sam continues to toil away in the laboratory), we thought about how it's a bit insensitive to use the term "madness." Being doctors, saying a patient is "mad" is a bit outdated. It feels kind of like that scene in the first season of Mad Men when Peggy is trying to get birth control, and the doctor begrudgingly gives it to her with instructions to keep her legs crossed. "Psychosis" is a much better word. It's not like crazy people know what that means.
Second, we obviously thought March Madness would be better if we got our narcissistic selves involved somehow. Sure, we like to watch the games and have a few pops with the boys around the block, but how cool would it be if we could be in the tournament?
Obviously we can't play in the games, but we thought we'd do our best to enact the next best thing. Behold, the Sub-15 Psychosis Big Bracket:
Now, if you're anything like Sam's wife, who just saw this bracket for the first time and had never heard of Sub-15 Psychosis before (because Sam made it up an hour ago) you might be asking some of the following questions:
- "How do basketball teams compete against people who submitted workouts?"
- "Actually, how does anybody compete in this bracket other than the basketball teams?"
- "More importantly, what exactly does the 'Dog/Wife Relay' entail?"
- "I'm not doing the 'Dog/Wife Relay.'"
1) Basketball teams beat other basketball teams based on real life. (This is the most straightforward part of Sub-15 Psychosis, so if you don't get this part, it's probably not the game for you.)
2) Red entrants are people who submitted workouts to us. The episode in which they're featured is the number in parentheses. These people "score" based on total page views of and comments on their episode. We'll take care of the math here. Essentially, the more popular episode wins. Episodes beat basketball teams if they "outscore" their basketball opponents via popularity. Again, we'll worry about the formula for comparing popularity to actual points in the game.
3) Blue entrants are running activities that Steve and Sam may or may not attempt to do throughout the rest of the NCAA tournament. If we do it, the workout advances regardless of what it's up against. Seems a little unfair until you consider how loathe we'll be to do those more than once before April 3rd (the date of the NCAA Championship).
4) Our shared goal is for one of our workout submitters (in red) to win Sub-15 Psychosis. Hence, we'll try to do the running activities that will knock out basketball teams (unless SU is playing or unless we feel like doing the Dog/Wife Relay or unless it's Backwards Day).
Entry: Brackets can either be emailed to Sam (sammack (at) gmail (dot) com) or you can fill out the online form we'll be putting up. We were going to kick things off on Saturday after we knew who was in the NCAA's "Elite Eight," but given the short turnaround, we've designed the contest so that people can enter in two phases.
"Early" Entry: Deadline is 7 pm on Thursday, March 22. Use the Big Bracket (see above) for your entry.
"Late" Entry: Deadline is tip-off for the first game on Saturday, March 24. By that time, we'll have condensed the Big Bracket into a smaller Sweet Sixteen version.
Prizes: Because we don't actually think anyone's going to do this based on the fact that it's insanely complicated, we're going to give a prize to the first person who submits a bracket. We'll also give a prize to the most accurate bracket, and a prize to the person who created the winning episode (if a red entrant indeed wins). We haven't worked out how we'll compare early and late brackets (we're only men, goddamnit!), but Steve and Sam will surely come up with an equitable solution. (Note: This may involve giving separate prizes.)
Prizes will be in the form of racing singlets with our new hipster logo on them, icy white tees of similar design, and/or iPad3's.
Good luck!
