65th Anniversary March Madness tournament, Legion style!

In honor of the Legion's 65th anniversary, welcome to 31st Century March Madness!

 

From January 2022 until March 2023, once a week I had put out a poll on the Legion of Substitute Podcasters Facebook group (also web, Twitter, Apple podcasts) asking the readers and listeners to vote for a person, place, or thing to represent the "Class" of a particular year. In general, I picked the significant (and sometimes insignificant) ones from the year they were first associated with the Legion, and I tried to capture all characters who appeared at least twice - or, in the case of ones like Fortress Lad and Arm-Fall-Off Boy, made a significant enough impact on the readers. The "Class of 1960", for example, consists of Chameleon Boy, Colossal Boy, Invisible Kid I, and Supergirl, while the "Class of 1998" consists of Driana Allon, Khund Chief Armorer Amilia Crugg, the Justice Legion L, the Legion of Executive Familiars, Dr. Ryk'rr, and Cary Wren. (For some of the later ones, like 1998, I had to post pictures and explanations of who they were, because even I couldn't remember!)

My idea was to then pit each of the "winners" against each other, March Madness style, so I came up with a seeding system based on the number of votes the character got, the total number of votes for that Class as a whole, and a sort of "strength of schedule" ranking based on the total votes that class got. Each week's vote was the equivalent of a conference tournament, and the champion gets an automatic slot in the big bracket tournament. It ended up that there were 59 slots for the 65 years of Legion history (I mashed together 1969-70, 1971-72, 2003-2005, 2013-14, and 2015-16 because there were so few new characters introduced in some of those years; and I included the first couple months of 2023 in with the 2022 class), leaving 9 openings to fill 68 slots. I decided to give 4 "wild card" slots to the highest-ranking non-winners, 3 slots to the list of characters I forgot to include along the way, and 2 slots to the list of L.E.G.I.O.N. and R.E.B.E.L.S. team members who I had forgotten to include. 

Then I placed each of them into a bracket based on the 2022 March Madness schedule, including which "games" are Thurs/Sat and which were Fri/Sun. Each round is associated with a Legion-related planet. 

For each entrant, there are a couple of numbers next to their names, the one on the inside being their overall seed 1-68 and the outer one being the seed for that bracket 1-17.

So each Tuesday through Friday of the tournament, I'm going to post a page here with all the "games" coming up in 2 days (so there are 2 voting days for each game), and then on Sunday I'll recap who's going to the Sweet Sixteen and Final Four. I'm putting all of the voting on Twitter, and then I'll consolidate the games here in one location.

• Selection Sunday: Sunday, March 12
• This is when I will post the complete bracket

• First Four: Tue/Wed March 14-15
• These are the four games on Aleph (gold), one for each bracket

• First round: Thu/Fri March 16-17
• Second round: Sat/Sun March 18-19
• Thurs/Sat: Weber's World (light yellow), Bismoll (light green), Kathoon (pink), Winath (orange)
• Fri/Sun: Cargg (light blue), Lallor (rose), Starhaven (gray), Braal (purple)

• Sweet 16: Thu/Fri March 23-24
• Elite Eight: Sat/Sun March 25-26
• Thurs/Sat: New Earth (yellow), Amazon Galaxy (green)
• Fri/Sun: Aleph (grapefruit), Planet Gotham (blue)

• Final Four: Sat April 1
• Legion's 65th Anniversary tournament championship game: Mon April 3 
• Ventura (dark green)

I hope it works out!

(Note: not associated with CBS or the NCAA, logo used for parody purposes only)