Baby Name Brackets

Usually, it only comes once a year: the chance to wager on which of your favorite college basketball teams will win the national championship. Count yourself as one of the lucky ones who gets to experience this phenomenon twice in one year.

I emailed an Excel spreadsheet to our friends and family members following the blog (if you didn't get one, email me). In it, we want you to guess which baby name will win each game. Will Thor beat out Henry? Maybe. Henry is a #1 seed, meaning he has a really good record: He's either a really popular name, or we really like the name, or maybe it's a combination of both. Thor is a #16 seed, so he's not a very popular name, and we probably don't like the name very much. But who knows what will happen ... could be an upset!

Periodically, we will post to the blog names that we are eliminating in each round. I'm guessing this will happen every 3 weeks or so, because there are 4 months between now and "go" time for baby troutface, and only six rounds of play.

You win points in each round based on how many games you guessed correctly. Brady will keep score. If you win it all and correctly guess our final name choice, you get two things: a) bragging rights, and b) honorary Aunt or Uncle status.

One caveat: If we happen to find a new name between now and late January when troutface enters The Real World and needs A Real Name, no worries. We will simply replace a high-seeded name in the bracket with this other, new name. Make sense? We don't expect this to happen, but it's possible.

You can fill out your bracket on your computer, if you have Excel software (I think you all probably have Excel), and email it back to me in 2 weeks. So the deadline to email it back is Monday, Oct 20.

Let the games begin!