2013 Murphspot Mascot Bracket - The Rules

It's Mid-March again. The snow has melted in Chicago until at least later tonight, the sun is setting at a reasonable hour and it's time once again to determine who would win the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament if the world were rational and this nonsense were decided by which mascot could win in a fight to the death.

Every time I do this, I tend to lose the thread and wind up with pages and pages on the first few rounds and a few sad, struggling paragraphs at the end of the tournament before crowning whoever either has a gun or is a dragon. So, this time around, some actual rules.

I. Self-Enforced Guideline for Entries:  I'm going to try to keep each match-up at around 150-200 words; hopefully that'll lead to a slightly more consistent feel overall.

II. Higher Seed Selects Field of Battle: The fact that we're (in terms of mascots, not actual basketball ability) just throwing teams together here can lead to a number of problems. If a dugong is fighting a springbok, where is that happening? The springbok'll drown in the dugong's natural habitat and the dugong will do whatever a dugong would do if you put it in central Namibia. Probably it would not go well. So, rather than just picking at random, I'll assume that the battlefield is in the habitat of the higher-seeded mascot. I'm also not sure anyone has ever used the contraction "springbok'll" in the context college basketball.

III. Similarly Named Teams to be Decided on Fierceness of Mascot, or, Failing That, Team Logo: There was probaby a way to come up with a name for this rule that didn't involve just making a terrible newspaper headline out of it, but this is madness so I won't bother.

IV. Earlier Matches May Be Precedent-Setting: It's difficult to say whether a Banded Mongoose taking down a Golden Mole in the first round should mean that it'll do the same to another mole encountered in the Elite Eight. Fatigue seems like it should play a factor, but for the most part, I'm going to let the Mongoose/Mole precedent stand. This will be the first to be discarded when I get sick of it.

So we'll see how that works. Next up: 2013 Murphspot Mascot Bracket - First Four. I'll be editing this post as we go to include links to the matchups as they happen.

Round One
First Four
Midwest - Round One - Part One
Midwest - Round One - Part Two
West - Round One - Part One
West - Round One - Part Two
South - Round One - Part One
South - Round One - Part Two
East - Round One - Parts One and Two

Round Two
Midwest
West
South
East

Sweet Sixteen
Midwest/West
South/East

Elite Eight

Final Four and Championship