Sadness 90s Bracket Time
+ tourney updates
Xness fans, we have tournament updates for you!
As of this writing, we have 48 of the 64 essays for this year’s March Sadness 90s Edition tournament in hand.
We expect most of the other 16 to arrive by midweek. The writers are WORKING.
As you know, we had a few folks drop out unexpectedly. Don’t worry, though: this happens every year, as life takes its turns. That opened up spots for 3 of you coming off the bench to join the tournament: Cooper Dart selected Brooks & Dunn’s “Neon Moon,” Ashley Naftule grabbed The Magnetic Fields’s “100,000 Fireflies,” and Katie Moulton drafted with Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Let Her Cry.” Hopefully that’ll be the last of this year’s subs we need, but we appreciate the list of you who emailed to volunteer.
Now the 2026 Bracket is live!
Here is the tournament bracket as a fillable Google Sheet (if you use the Google Sheet, you must make a copy before filling it out). You can also download it as a pdf or an Excel file. Fill out your bracket (all you have to do is make your predictions for the winner of each game using whatever criteria you want), name the file with your last name first, and email it to marchxness @ thediagram.com no later than midnight 2/28/26.
If someone wants to turns this pdf into a fillable one, that would be awesome, but otherwise we are good to go. If you haven’t filled out a bracket before, you’re just making predictions as to which song/essay in each matchup will win.
Here’s how we score them: each correct prediction for the 1st round = 1 point. Each correct 2nd round prediction = 2 points. Sweet 16 = 4; Elite 8 = 8; Final 4 = 16; Final game = 32; Championship = 64. The bracket with the most points wins. We ask for a final game score prediction we’ll use as a tiebreaker, though historically we have not needed one.
Each person can submit only one bracket, but other family members can submit brackets.
Let the predictions and arguments begin!
Ander & Megan, your Official March Xness Selection Committee.