The Origins and Future of The Bracket of Awesome

February of 2011, I was in my second semester of my Sophomore year at Lincoln High School in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. I was tired of the day-to-day tediousness of my class schedule and was not looking for a job just yet so there appeared to be no real escape except for the short blurb of insanity that is college basketball's March Madness tournament.

The tournament usually runs from mid-March to early-to-mid-April and gets every college basketball fanatic or sport-obsessed viewer pumped up with the wild unpredictability of a Cinderella team or the buzzer-beaters that are remembered 22 years later (Christian Laettner at Duke). But as quickly as it steals our hearts... it's gone.

The bracket-style tournament goes way too quickly for most of us and it makes our April's sort of depressing in a way. That's why I thought of the Bracket of Awesome. The BOAwe is a 7-week, 64-seed tournament of foods, sports-related items, people, phrases, memes, trends, movies, music, and other basic pop-culture related items that make the world smile and shake their heads in amazement at the possibility that something could be so cool, funny, relevant or just plain awesome.

At first, I made the brackets using good 'ole Microsoft Works Spreadsheet feature, printed the weekly bracket and went around getting votes from an odd number of my closest friends. As you can probably tell, it wasn't expected to be more than a one year deal that nobody would take seriously or really care about (other than nominees Alex Neeb and Nick Zurawski). I don't think I ever got more than fifteen votes in one round. No matter the total, it was fun for people involved and I thought about bringing it back another year....

Inaugural Bracket of Awesome 2011 Winner: Betty White

This picture wasn't exactly the best advertisement for the bracket.

Sometime in between March 2011 and March 2012, Facebook introduced a new entirely-free app which allowed users, groups, and pages to post polls which had the capability of only being voted on by fans or being spread to a wide variety of people in a sort of quiet advertising campaign. It was genius and the reason why the Bracket of Awesome became what it is today.

On February 9th, 2012, I had an idea to put four local heroes (Jake Raflik, Cal Thomas, Cole Walters, and Nathaniel Hoefs) and start using this free facebook app to it's full advantage, thus spreading the word about this epic bracket. When March came, I expected a solid showing of fifty-or-so votes and an eventual winner of either Morgan Freeman or one of the Wisconsin Rapids characters. The results were what I expected besides the one round that will be remembered as the greatest week in bracketing history, the final four match-ups of Morgan Freeman vs. Large Amounts of Money and Cole Walters vs. Jake Raflik.

I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with Cole Walters, if you happen to have the pleasure of residing in Wisconsin or you've ever attended a Wisconsin-based sporting event. The man is a champion of all sorts, uniting Lincoln High School in cheering on the school's teams and igniting chants that will go down in Lincoln history. He may be short-tempered but he's The Man, the Myth, the Legend Cole Walters and there's not much arguing against that.

Jake Raflik is basically the most individualistic human being I have ever become acquainted with. He was basically my sidekick that year in Intro to Web Design and Psychology classes and was a big part of uplifting everyone around him literally every day. He fronted a heavy rock band, rode bulls, and in his youth, occasionally hissed at people. On top of all that, he had a glorious faux-hawk.

His pose says philosopher, while everything else screams "awesome".

These two were pretty obsessed with recruiting people to vote for them (sometimes overlapping, resulting in back-stabbing) and it was a hilarious week of fake (at least I hope it was fake) tension.

The results of this final four match-up? After 201 votes from Rapids, Madison, New Jersey, and yes... even Australia: Cole Walters 108 - Jake Raflik 93.

Bracket Of Awesome Year 2 Winner (2012): Cole Walters 

All he does is win, win, win. No matter what.

Cole beat out Morgan Freeman in a closely-contested matchup, winning 49-46. Click here for the entire 2012 bracket of results.

2013 was one of the best years ever and even with a terrific field of local nominees (Logan Zimmerman, Valerie Tonn, Ben Cattanach, and Robert Gawlitta), the BOAwe ended up slowly losing traction and ended up with a weak (still awesome though, don't get me wrong) champion in "Vacations".

Bracket of Awesome Year 3 (2013) Winner: Vacations

Meh, vacations never played hockey, bought pizza for an entire class of students, allowed karaoke day, or was Ben Cattanach at any point in time.

The fact that the bracket was lacking in votes didn't bother me one bit as it was still fun and made people smile and/or laugh for a couple seconds and that's really the only reason this bracket exists and I do what I do, to make people enjoy life a smidgen more. That's why I handed over the Bracket of Awful (RIP 2012-2013) to somebody else, it was just too much work for something that brought up awful topics like "Hitler" and "The Potato Famine". Although, when those two faced off against each other... amazing.  I'm just amazed that the bracket went from this...

to what it is today.

With all that said, the Bracket of Awesome has returned and I need any fans to be as patient as possible as Facebook has removed their free polling app and let's face it, I am not paying for something we had available for free for two years. First round polling will take place on pollcode.com at approximately Midnight Central Standard Time. It'll only take one more click and one more minute of your awesome time. If this new voting website does not work, we may have to move the bracket to 2011 nominee Nick Zurawski's Bracket Bonanza facebook group. I will make sure to publicly address that on the Bracket of Awesome Facebook page, if that change becomes necessary.

Anyways, keep a look out on the facebook page as I will post links to polls ASAP. The nominees are glorious this year (as always) and will make you proud to be alive in 2014.

Thank you for reading this (unless that's you Zuckerburg... you know what you did),

Andy Todd