On Wednesday morning (March 17), MTV News' James Montgomery combined his love of college basketball, rock bands, gambling, list-making and staggeringly deep internal logic to form his Musical March Madness bracket. The sprawling bracket — both a parody and a tribute to the NCAA basketball tournament, which kicks off on Thursday (March 18) — takes the 65 biggest names in rock, splits them up into four regions, assigns them seeds and puts them up against one another in a single-elimination series of match-ups in a winner-take-all contest.
Initially, it just seemed like a cool idea to compare a bunch of bands to college basketball teams and argue over whether or not Owl City belonged in the East or if a 12 seed was too low for Nick Jonas. But it has already become a little bigger than that. Earlier today, Mark Hoppus saw that his band Blink-182 had scored a number one seed and tweeted about the bracket. So far, Montgomery has received a handful of brackets from people who have made their picks and chosen a champion (without solicitation).
So clearly, it's time to decide an actual champ in this field of 65. Over the next few weeks, we will present a series of polls that will allow you to vote for the match-ups presented in MTV News' Band Bracketology. You vote for the winners, we'll keep advancing the seeds and, in the end, we'll have some sort of champion. What will the winner receive? Little more than our esteem (as well as that of the fans) and some Internet bragging rights.
The proper tournament kicks off on Thursday (March 18), but it got started in earnest on Tuesday night (March 16) when the University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff beat Winthrop in the qualifying game. That's why we have to decide who wins the qualifying match-up of our bracket, which pits Florida aggro-punkers Against Me! against the recently reformed Creed. Who will win to qualify for the opening round match-up against top overall seed Kings of Leon? Vote below and start the madness!