Everyone's Doing Their Own Brackets

So with March Madness in full swing (the best month of the sports year!), I keep hearing different people doing their own versions of brackets. The bracket itself is such an interesting concept: rank things highest to lowest, square each of them off in pairs with the winner advancing, and eliminate until you're left with an eventual champion. Now with social networking and instant fan feedback, so many radio shows are doing bracket-style gimmicks in their shows. And let me be honest - I love it! It's kind of how my brain works, compare two things, pick the better of the two, and then decide how MUCH better it is than everything else. Simply fascinating.

Two brackets I've really liked recently have been music related: Colin Cowherd (on his radio show, The Herd) did a top music groups bracket, and then the local sports radio show around Houston (The Blitz) did a unique spin on that: worst musical groups, which I enjoyed so much. For instance, one of the second-round matchups squared off the New School boy band Jonas Brothers against the Old School boy band, Hanson. It was amazing! And the final was great too: Insane Clown Posse narrowly being defeated by David Hasselhoff. It definitely made listening to the radio on my lunch break suck that much less.

So with those two music-related brackets as guides, I had an idea: a bracket of the best bands of all time, seeded according to long-term success, and then having matchups set as each band's top 5 songs head-to-head, majority-rules.

That way, a band like Boston, who really only had one great album and then broke up, would be seeded low due to such a short-term lifespan - but then their top 5 hits are a murderer's row against the best of them: More Than A Feeling, Foreplay (Long Time), Smokin', Rock 'n Roll Band...I mean that's tough to beat. So, I like this idea, and I think that my four #1 seeds would be as follows (keeping in mind that these are for long-term success in the music industry): The Rolling Stones, U2, KISS, and Aerosmith.

The Beatles (my favorites to win it all, since I think they're the best band of all time) would land somewhere around a 3 seed? Because they were only a band from 1963-70, yet with that you forget that they put out at least an album a year, sometimes two. So they're not quite Coldplay, with 4 albums over 10 years of being a legitimate chart-topper, but they can be a dark horse and come from nowhere to win it all.

So go ahead and try to tell me this idea sucks, because it doesn't.