The Big Dance

March Madness is just around the corner! Though I derive no joy losing money betting on college basketball teams I know nothing about, I do find it fun to fill out the brackets. So I had the idea to apply the same ridiculous, seemingly random, unpredictable and exciting tournament format to determine the greatest Beatles song!

I used several types of data to determine which songs made it into the top 64:

• Was the song a #1? (two points)
• Did the song chart at all? (one point)
• Was the song released as the A-side or B-side of a single? (A-side=two points, B-side=one point)
• Was it one of the top songs streamed on Spotify? (one point)
• How many times has the song been covered by other artists? (one point per cover)
• Do I think it's one of their best? (one point)

The cover versions really determined who made it to the dance, and that gave songs like "Come Together" and "Yesterday" top ranking. I had to figure some way to determine their "quality" and what better way than by people doing covers? After all, imitation is the highest form of flattery. I mean, look at how many covers the Beatles performed and recorded!

This is all for fun. The idea is that a bunch of you will submit your completed brackets (or lists of each round's winners) and I'll figure who won each "game" based on which song more people chose to win. Simple. I think I need at least 25 submissions to get this thing off right and next year I can use these results to determine rankings. Or next year we can have a "coach's poll" where the only songs used in the tournament are the top 64-68 votes each of you make. More on that later. Also, if one of you wants to suggest a way to bet on this, email me.  I made the cutoff date early as it is because I'll be in Austin for SXSW and sorta spread thin...so I'd like to be able to cull all the data BEFORE I go to Texas.  My plan is to announce the winners of each game as the tournament progresses, round by round, via the twitter account connected to this blog.

Interested? Right-click on the image, save the bracket to your computer and project which of these 64 songs is the best Beatles song EVER! Return completed brackets to hehpodcast@gmail.com by March 10, 2016 and help choose which Beatles song is this year's champion!