Introducing the "Best of Underdog Dynasty 2015" Tournament

There are many ways to define "best" when it comes to the articles that appear on our site. Is it the article that drew the most traffic? Maybe. What about the article that had the most comments? That, too, could work but depends on other factors. Of course, the easiest way to both settle this debate and start other ones is to pit them against each other, force other people to vote on winners and subsequently remove all responsibility from yourself for having to choose a winner!

Alright, we're willing to participate a little bit, so let me explain how this is going to work.

Step One: Gathering the candidates

We will give automatic berths in the tournament bracket to the 12 articles that finished in first place for traffic each month, with a couple of exceptions. Those articles that were "best" in slow months like March will be set aside in favor of articles that finished second in months where multiple articles did very well.

After that, it will go up to submissions. We will require a minimum of four additional submissions, but will take as may as 20 if the submissions result in that high a number. Any person can suggest any article, with the obvious caveat that your suggestion will be politely discarded if that article is already on the list.

I'm not sure yet how exactly we will seed the teams, I'm very open to suggestions on that part.

Deadlines for submission are next Sunday, January 31st at 10 PM CST. Send in your submissions either by commenting on this article, commenting/posting on our Facebook page, or via a Twitter notification with the hashtag #UDD2015.

Step Two: Let the brackets begin!

We will post the tournament one weekend at a time. Each post will feature the matchups to be voted on and a little backstory about each post that is being voted on. Obviously, as the weeks go by those stories will narrow and vanish, but there's only so much you an say about each article before you run a little thin.

At the end, a winner will be crowned, and the writer of that article will win a prize that will be kept SUPER DUPER SECRET until some time much closer to the final vote. Be assured that the prize will be awesome, so if you'd like your favorite story, writer etc. to win then make sure you submit your favorite works as soon as possible!