The Other Bracket Season

For longtime followers: We’re going to give a little history here, but the information you’re seeking is below.

For newer followers: We do brackets in the summer.

Back in 2020, when society shut down and Stuber Eats picked up, we began doing voting brackets to pass the time: License Plate Bracket I. Tournament of Animals You Do *Not* Want in Your Home. The legendary 90’s Bangers Bracket. The premise was exactly what you’re familiar with: We’d put things in a bracket and ask people to vote on them.

This went rather well for us, and everyone involved seemed to enjoy it, so we did it again in 2021, and we did it again in 2022, and we’re doing it again this year. From right about now until right about college football season, we’re doing brackets.

One significant change this year is that voting will only take place in our Instagram stories and on Google Forms. There will no longer be voting on Twitter. As we understand it, starting April 15^th you’ll have to pay for Twitter Blue to vote in polls, and we don’t pay for Twitter Blue ourselves, so we certainly won’t ask you to do that.

We’re aiming to have our first bracket published next Tuesday, with voting beginning that Wednesday. To get there, we need your help. We’ll be starting with some iteration of the Bangers Bracket, but we need to figure out which iteration to do. We’ve done the 90’s Bangers Bracket. We’ve done the 2000’s Bangers Bracket. We’ve done Bangers III (2010-2014). We’re rapidly catching up to ourselves. We cannot continue at this pace.

The three options we’re considering for this year are as follows:

• 80’s Bops, a similar concept to what we’ve done in the past but altered to account for the fact that most of our followers are 40 and below, so most of our followers don’t have nostalgic associations with the 80’s and have encountered 80’s music more in a throwback setting than in a moment of genuine banger.
• Bangers We’ve Missed (working title), a rundown of the 25 years we’ve already done but only featuring songs not in our bracket. The upside here is that we would finally get TiK ToK in a bracket, as it was an oversight by our nominating committee in the 2000’s Bangers Bracket.
• All-Star Bangers (another working title), the best of the best from the 25 years we’ve covered. For this, we’d put the top 21 from each bracket into the new bracket, as well as TiK ToK.

We’ll run through this again tomorrow, but we’re going to have you vote on the three options, and we’ll do whichever idea is the most popular. The rough timeline for this goes:

• Tuesday (tomorrow): Vote on which bracket to do from the options above.
• Wednesday/Thursday: Submit nominations for songs in that bracket (if applicable—otherwise, we’ll just start the next step a day early).
• Friday through Sunday: Vote on nominations to set the field.
• Tuesday: Reveal the bracket.
• Wednesday: Begin bracket voting.

As we go through this process, we’re going to check in on our license plates and state flags to see what changes we’ve missed. I would imagine License Plate Bracket III comes next (we didn’t get to license plates last summer—the worst thing that’s ever happened at The Barking Crow), and that State Flags IV will come closer to real summer. There will be other brackets, of course, but this is how the situation currently stands.

We can’t wait to bop or bang with you, and we’re excited for the other brackets as well. If you’re struggling to understand what’s happening, don’t worry. It will make sense once it’s underway. One thing that will help a lot? Follow The Barking Crow on Instagram. Most of this happens there.