Lost, March Madness style: an introduction

March means tournaments. Besides the NCAA men's basketball tournament, RedEye just started its annual Best TV Character Tournament, and it got me to thinking about the Road to Springfield tournament many years back to crown the best Simpsons supporting character (the site doesn't exit anymore, sadly). In turn, I started thinking about whether a similar tournament could be done using characters from Lost.

It turns out that I wasn't the first person to think up such a diversion. The Washington Post held "Lost Madness" in 2008. The only problem, as any good bracketologist could tell you, was the way they seeded everybody: Hurley vs Sawyer and Jin vs Sun are ludicrous first round match-ups. The show has also introduced a few new characters who could possibly make an impact.

Clearly, there needs to be a course correction.

Since I can't garner the votes necessary for a proper tournament, I'm going to do a mock tournament of Lost's characters, with a properly-seeded bracket that follows the regulations of the NCAA tournament. Upsets won't be as likely, since I'm calling the shots and there isn't much to leave to fate unless I decide an unusually evenly-matched contest with a coin flip. But I think there could be plenty of opportunities for surprises - I'm determining seeding mostly by the number of episodes a character has appeared in, so somebody like Mr. Eko or Faraday could easily sneak into a high round.

It's time to determine our own Candidate.