Legion March Madness: Who's in the Final Four?

After 2 weeks of voting, here's your Final Four! Matches starting Wednesday March 29 and ending Friday March 31: 

• #1 Timber Wolf vs #2 Brainiac 5
• To get here, Timber Wolf beat #17 King Jonn of Pasnic, #8 Zymyr, #5 Kono, and #10 XS
• To get here, Brainiac 5 beat #15 Superboy (Jon Kent), #7 Eltro Gand, #3 Ultra Boy, and #1 Princess Projectra
• #1 Element Lad vs #2 Saturn Girl
• To get here, Element Lad beat #16 Sodam Yat, #9 Invisible Kid II, #5 Blok, and #10 Cosmic Boy
• To get here, Saturn Girl beat #15 Wildstar, #10 Matter-Eater Lad, #6 Dawnstar, and #1 Chameleon Boy

The winners will then match up starting Friday, with the voting to be concluded on Sunday April 2. (Yes, the real basketball tournament games are on Saturday and Monday, but I'm moving that up a day so that we can talk about the results on the podcast which records on Sunday night.)

• Who's your winner pick? My prediction is Saturn Girl defeating Timber Wolf for the Championship.

Now, for some behind the scenes stuff that you can skip if you don't feel like reading about how the voting was conducted.

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As I've mentioned, I co-host the Legion of Substitute Podcasters show (website, podcast home) which comes out every Monday morning. In late 2021, I came up with the idea of doing a poll for every year of the Legion's existence, but it was a few weeks until it occurred to me that the actual anniversary date fell really close to the March Madness tournament, and the 65 years would lead to 65 rounds of polling which was pretty darn close to the 68 entrants the NCAA tournament holds. So that was my goal, and each week I presented a new poll to the members of the LoSP Facebook group, and they are the ones who voted. I took those numbers and put them into a spreadsheet for seeding into the brackets. Ultimately, my plan was to put the bracket out on Twitter for anyone to vote.

I've been asked how I did the seeding. It took a few weeks to tweak it how I wanted, but it included elements that allowed me to simulate (sort of) how the NCAA college basketball tournament works. Some conferences get to automatically send their winner to the tournament, and there are a number of at-large slots reserved for stronger teams that didn't win their conference as well as for winners of smaller conferences. For this tournament, each year of voting ("the class of 1962") was like a conference tourney with an automatic bid for the winner, and I reserved some spots at the end for wild cards. I came up with a formula to rank everyone based on these four elements:

1. How many votes did that person (or place or thing) get in their round?
2. How many total votes were cast in that round?
3. A flat bonus for winning the round, as I wanted the winner to stand out over non-winners, but not so much of a bonus that all winners were above all non-winners.
4. How does the number of votes in that round compare to the votes in all of the other rounds? I used this as a "strength of schedule" analog.

My formula for calculating everyone's score: Points = (votes cast for that person + total votes in the round + bonus) * square root of (strength of schedule). Yes, I understand that I'm double-counting the number of votes cast for the person, but I felt that you should be rewarded for both separately. 

Here's how 1958 came out, for example:

Saturn Girl got 19 of 54 votes, thus making her the winner, so the first part of the formula comes up with (19 + 54 + 150). The 54 votes cast for the 1958 class was the 6th best, so it came out to a rank of 58/64, pretty good. This was enough to give Saturn Girl the overall #7, which meant a #2 seed in her bracket.

For another example, here's 2022:

The Golden Age Legionnaire got nearly the same number of individual votes as Saturn Girl, but there were far fewer votes cast for the class of 2022 overall, meaning their strength of schedule was lower, giving the winner a lower point total and a lower ranking.

Here's the lowest ranking out of all 68 entrants:

Their winner rank of 362 is by far the lowest (next is the Promethean Giants from 2013 at #276) of the 68 teams, so they ended up with a #17 seed. But as a weekly winner, they get an automatic berth; my #16s and #17 got to play in the First Four, for the right to lose to the #1 seed in that bracket.

I ended up with 59 weekly winners for the 65 years that the Legion has been around (I had to merge some years due to too few new characters). That left me with 9 open slots, which I used for:

• 2 slots for 22 members of the L.E.G.I.O.N. or R.E.B.E.L.S. books who I neglected to add
• That's how the Omega Men and Wildstar got in
• 3 slots for the 104 "Oops, I forgot to include them", including those who were part of Mon-El's JLA or Starman's JSA; members of the various versions of the JLA, JSA, and Titans that the Legion teamed up with over the years; and anyone I just forgot to include earlier
• That's how Anti-Lad, Mary Marvel, and Flash (Wally West) got in
• 4 slots for the 22 wildcard second chances, anyone who got 10 or more votes in an earlier round but did not win their round
• That's how Dream Girl, Ambush Bug, Cosmic Boy, and Matter-Eater Lad got in despite not winning their initial round

The good news is that if I ever decide to do this again, I've got the templates all worked out already! But not next year, since I would have had to have started back in January to get all those weekly votes using some other criteria. Maybe an "oops, all villains" tournament? Or maybe take the top 3 vote-getters instead of just the top 1. Hmmm...