the march sadness 1990s edition bracket

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.

The 2025 Tournament Songs — and Writers

If you’re new to the tournament, the way it works is that we do a lottery each summer (first week of August 2024, so get your name in if you’d like to write @ the link in the menu above). From that lottery 64 writers are selected. Each writer chooses an eligible song and writes an essay about that song. The 64 songs the writers select are the songs in the tournament. Writers may select a song from the longlist (which we offer as a starting point) or pitch another song.

Eligible songs must be commercially released 2000-2009. They must be dance songs, whatever that means exactly (this is a question the tournament itself addresses each year). Dance songs are typically songs meant to be danced to. Just because you can dance to a song doesn’t make it a dance song, but some songs migrate to the dancefloor. If a song mentions dancing, the floor, ass-shaking, da club, etc, that helps its prospects re danceness. If it was actually a club hit, even better! We have a relatively inclusive approach. So this year’s tournament absolutely will involve indie dance, hip hop, electroclash, dance-punk, plenty of mainstream dance-pop or straight-up pop, maybe some synthwave, and more.

We’re trying to restrict the longlist to one song per artist except for some of the absolutely major ones (Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, LCD Soundsystem, Madonna, Kylie, Rihanna, Britney, etc). Remixes are okay. New versions of older songs (like DJ Sammy’s dance cover of “Heaven”) are fine, as are rereleases (“Something Good ‘08”) if they had significant spins/airplay/club play.

A minor remix of a 80s or 90s song, however, is unlikely.

Most of our playlist is upbeat. We have a few comedown songs on the playlist but these are a minority.

Our tournament is primarily about American music, and our playlist reflects that, though plenty of songs that were big in the UK or other countries may also factor here, as the Selection Committee sees fit.

Once the writers have selected their songs, we’ll post the list here.

bracket Methodology

To be determined.