The combination of sports and the Grateful Dead is no foreign concept. Legendary basketball player Bill “Grateful Red” Walton is a well-known follower of the band, and the Dead even helped the Lithuanian men’s basketball team go to the Summer Olympic Games in 1992.

In the spirit of the marriage of the Dead and sports, Dead For A Year is pleased to announce a Dead themed bracket pool for this year’s NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament.

What we’ve done is assigned a Dead song to each team in the tournament. Not only will you have something interesting to listen to when you fill out your bracket, but it should be fun to see how far some of these selections go. So let the Dead help you pick a winner!

How we pick the tunes:

The idea here is to associate each tournament team with a specific Dead song. The challenge on our end becomes, “which song?” Ultimately, the selections are subjective, picked by myself and @mustangmods who suggested the idea in the first place. We each are picking half of the bracket.

The first obstacle is picking the shows. Our criteria for picking shows:

1. A show at the actual school

2. A show in the actual city

3. A show in a nearby metro area

4. A show in the state/ region

The Dead played on numerous college campuses throughout their career and in 46 of the 50 states so there are plenty of options. Once we selected a show, we picked a song to represent each team. If a tune correlates to a team somehow that’s great, but otherwise the picks are purely subjective.