Twitter goes bonkers over this bracket — and it has nothing to do with basketball
Mizzou vs Florida State? K-State vs. Creighton? KU vs. Penn? Who cares?
The only bracket that seems to matter on the internet right now is the Kanye Madness bracket, a March Madness-style bracket pitting classic Kanye West songs against one another.
Thank you, Carrington Harrison.
The madness started on Sunday when Harrison, co-host of 610 Sports Radio talk show "The Drive," debuted the Kanye-themed bracket with a now-viral tweet hours before the NCAA selection committee announced its field of 68 teams for the NCAA tournament.
Within hours, thousands on Twitter, including ESPN talking head Bomani Jones, NFL Hall of Famer Cris Carter and Fox Sports personality (and 610 sports alum) Nick Wright were chiming in and filling out their 'Ye brackets.
The idea began brewing a few weeks ago when Harrison was listening to "Spaceship" off of West's debut album, "The College Dropout."
"I was listening to 'Spaceship' and I was thinking, this is probably someone's favorite Kanye song. And the idea hit me: Let's find out what people's favorite is."
So he called up a group of friends and fellow Kanye fans — Jasmyn Franks, Jeremy Yon, Brandon Shackelford, Damon Smith, Kyle Oliver, Cole Foss, Paige Cooper and local hip-hop artists Gee Watts and Jamel "The Royal Chief" Thompson — and began thinking through which of the hip-hop icon's litany of classic songs should be included.
The selections were then placed in four "regions" named after West's mother and children ("Donda," "North West," "Chicago" and "Saint") and given seeds of 1 to 16.
"Monster" vs "Heartless" in the Donda region? Can "Amazing" pull the upset over No. 1 seed "Can't Tell Me Nothing" in the North West? Wait a minute, how did "Gone" not get in? "Gorgeous" only notched a 3 seed?!
The near-impossible task of pitting top West songs against one another quickly sent Twitter users worldwide into a lighthearted uproar.
Defensive end Chris Long of the Super Bowl LII champion Philadelphia Eagles tweeted, "I’m mentally exhausted w this bracket. no consistent method to selection. RIP to my mentions."
He later went on to tweet, "I’m creating a petition for @cdotharrison to now work overtime and create an outkast bracket. There will be sacrifice, friends lost and time that we will all never get back. But it’s the right move."
"It's been fun to see the different emotional attachments people have to certain songs," Harrison says. "It's cool to see how Kanye's music has impacted people's lives the way it has mine."
To help with the decision-making, Harrison released playlists featuring all of the included songs on Apple Music and Spotify.
You can listen to Harrison and his friends debate their "bracketology" and vote online for each of the match-ups here. Or do things the old-fashioned way and print out a physical ballot. After you're done, you can watch Harrison and his friends break down each region here.
"We knew the idea had some wheels in our immediate circle, but this reaction, it's insane," says Franks.
The founder and director of local digital marketing agency Just Jump Media, Franks spearheaded the project's visual direction, a labor of love in its own right:
"I’m a pretty big Ye fan and I know how important aesthetics are to him," Franks says.
Each of the songs on the bracket are listed in typefaces and color schemes used by West in previous album artwork.
"I really wanted to make sure I knocked this out of the park."
By Monday afternoon, the #KanyeMadness bracket had more than 26,000 retweets and more than 70,000 likes.
The success already has the group thinking of the next possible bracket. Drake, anyone?
This story was originally published March 12, 2018 at 6:17 PM with the headline "Twitter goes bonkers over this bracket — and it has nothing to do with basketball."