That's right, it's...
This tournament will work much like Bruce The Duck's Best Song Tournament 2.0, except at the end of this one we will know what song in Weird Al's oeuvre the fans collectively feel is his absolute worst song. I know there are a lot of crappy ones to sort through, but we will take our time and use our best judgment and at the end of the day, we will have a winner. Or rather, a loser.
Here's how this tournament is going to work:
Rather than sort the match-ups totally randomly like Elvis did or by similar subject matter like Bruce The Duck did, I have created a weighted tournament which works much like a March Madness bracket to determine the outcome. I will be using the same nine categories that Jeremy came up with the last time around, except this time the best song in the group will be paired with the worst, the second best with the second worst and so on. (More on how this ranking was determined in just a minute...)
So the tournament breakdown will go as follows:
Please ignore the year-looking numbers there. I just stole that image from the Internet. The point is that these rankings are how the matchups will be determined.
Why do it this way? Good question.
One of the few flaws I found in Jeremy's model was that too often great songs were being paired with other great songs while crappy songs were being paired with other crappy songs. Therefore certain bad songs were making it further along than others, while other great songs were getting prematurely knocked out. Jeremy's rationale here made sense, which is that it means the finals rounds would go by faster as a result. But I disagree with this fundamental premise. In my opinion, in a tournament like this, the later rounds should be more competitive.
In an NCAA tournament, the first rounds are usually blowouts to weed out the teams that don't belong. In the first round above, the top seeded team plays the lowest seeded team, but in the second round, they will play a team from the very middle of the stack. In theory, the last round of such a tournament would pit the two best teams against each other.
So therefore, on this tournament, we will weed out the best songs of Al's career early on in the process, leaving the quarters, semis, and finals with the worst of the worst. And even in the first round, some matches will be more interesting than others. For example, while 16 will probably beat 1 in most cases (remember the songs are seeded from best to worst so the 16s actually have the best chance to win. kind of confusing, i know, but bear with me), some of the middle matches will be very interesting to watch.
A couple of other interesting side effects:
1) We will know right away whether a matchup results in an "upset" or not, objectively. A lot of time in the NCAA a 12-seed beats a 5-seed, which usually make for more interesting games.
2) This will help to assuage both the "late-comers" crowd and the early voters, as I've essentially crowdsourced the weightings. Each ranking was determined by a complex formula combining the results of Elvis's "The Greatest Weird Al Songs Of All Time" list with Bruce the Duck's "Best Song Tournament 2.0." Thus the matchups are already determined by public opinion, so if you miss out on voting for a few, you can rest assured that the input of the forum was taken into account. However those who have a lot of free time and vote in nearly every competition early will clearly have all the power to determine the outcomes.
Round one matchups will require four votes to move on, which will also help the late-comers.
Otherwise, all of the same rules from Jeremy's tournament will apply, most notably that any edited post will not count as a vote.
Please take some time to review the rules and format above and post your questions in this thread. I now need to take some time to create all of those little pictures for each round. If anyone has a good place I can upload 200 or so JPGs, let me know via PM.
I hope all of this wasn't too confusing. I will be happy to clarify anything that doesn't make sense and would even consider amending these rules if there is enough dissent.
One more thing I'd like to say: I know there is a lot of feeling on this forum that some people are sensitive about negative things said about Al and his music. Given the nature of this tournament, there is going to be A LOT of dissing Al's songs going on. If you are uncomfortable with that, you might not want to participate in this tournament. But please understand that this is all meant in good fun. Even if I totally rip apart your favorite song, it's certainly not meant as an attack on you. We all love Weird Al, we all love his songs, so where else in the world would it be better to argue about which of these songs is his worst? Let's hope no one gets too upset. And PLEASE feel free to speak your mind on what you really think.
I hope to get this thing up and running just as soon as I create all of those little pictures. I've already created the brackets and there are some really interesting matchups which I can't wait to see play out.
Stay tuned...
It's here!
