So the first round of the Bitchy Bracket is done, and we're ready to move on to the second round of voting. Before starting in on voting, though, let's take a brief look at the first-round results, which saw all sorts of touchy fanboys knocked off, including some that, honestly, deserved less respect than they got.


Soccer fans, the top seed in the sports regional, cruised to an easy win, setting up a tough battle with Boston sports fans in what's easily an Elite Eight-worthy matchup. (Basketbloggers had to go for this to happen, but that just goes to show that, as a hermeneutical matter, this tournament has transcended an easy view of competition as having to do with wins and losses, in favor of a more nuanced—even ironic—perspective.) Duke fans proved even scrappier and more committed to fundamentals than Notre Dame fans, but they'll have to get past MLS defenders to move on. Penn State made a play to somehow become the tournament Cinderella by managing to topple hockey fans, who'd been tipped early as a strong contender to win it all, but they've got a tough matchup coming against the infamously thin-skinned "Best Fans in Baseball."


The culture quadrant was pretty much chalk, aside from the 14th-seeded juggalos opening up the Riddle Box and finding a surprise victory over Trekkies. Meanwhile, top seed #TeamBreezy beat the shit out of "prestige" TV fans, and probably won't have a much more difficult time of it with Bob Dylan lovers. The most interesting result may have been Beliebers beating R. Kelly fans 89%-11%; having run up a margin of victory like that on such high-quality competition, they have to be taken seriously as a threat here.

Politics came out nicely, with three of the four second-round matchups essentially setting up as contests for dominance of the overlapping areas of various Venn diagrams. This regional saw the closest contest, with libertarians triumphing over hardcore atheists, with a mere 57 votes giving them a winning 50.15% share. Look for Richard Dawkins to buy some ads on buses in London hailing this as vindication of his ideas.

The lifestyle regional was always clearly the strongest part of the bracket, as you can tell just by reeling off the names of the departed: New Jerseyites, Chicagoans, and fans of the horrifying diarrhea sludge Cincinnati calls chili were all knocked off straight away. In perhaps the most telling result, longform magazine journalists, who surely would have made a serious run in any other bracket, could do nothing against anti-vaccination crusaders, and they spent the rest of the day mournfully jerking each other off on Twitter. Is there an inoculation against smarm?

Alright now, on to the voting. Polls close at 11:30 a.m. tomorrow.







Advertisement