The bracket above comes courtesy of reader Evan Gregory, who has filled in the first-round winners. Beyond his NOTY fandom, Evan is also one of The Gregory Brothers, known for their soulful songifications of news and pop culture. Thanks, Evan! We promised we’d share your bracket, and a promise like that is unbreakable.
NOTY succeeds only because of its symbiotic relationship with its fans. You feed us hundreds of names and we refine them into a bracket of compelling matchups. When the seeds are set, you use our framework to create more joyous things, including Evan’s updated bracket, Daniel Wood’s sublime vote tracker, Dave Mercier's calligraphic chalkboard, and Deadspin’s podcast guffaws, led by Drew Magary.
Organizations thrive when individual members come together in pursuit of a higher goal (in our case, the celebration of great names). One person who understands this well is Dragonwagon Regional seven-seed Candida Seasock, the founder of a business mentorship firm called CTS Associates.
In her line of work, Candida meets with businesses that range from Fortune 500 to emerging companies. She leads the award-winning “Growth Path to Success,” which “is based on targeted business development, strategic marketing, fostering strong and long-term client relationships and implementing 360-degree agility into a company’s processes and operations.”
One piece of advice Candida offers concerns smart hiring practices. If companies only look to check off boxes on a job description, they could enlist toxic employees and negatively affect their culture. “Skills can be taught or developed, but honesty and integrity are found from within,” she told The Huffington Post in 2016.
It’s not just Candida’s clients who work together efficiently; her name is highly synergistic as well. Its syllables undulate pleasantly from stressed to unstressed, and its sharp /ee/ sounds, arranged in an assonant pair, hit like snare drums. Lexically, she offers both brains and brawn. Candida’s first name evokes the legendary wit of Voltaire, while her surname conjures an image of a forceful, briny gust of wind.
Thanks to those interwoven elements, Candida earned a decisive first-round victory over 10-seed Adele Gorrilla. In her next matchup, she’ll face an opponent whose moniker has its own ties to corporate America: 15-seed Yo’Heinz Tyler, who hails from Louisiana but shares a name with a company based in Pittsburgh. If the incoming Ball State freshman wide receiver winds up catching passes for the Steelers at Heinz Field one day, he’ll pull off one of the greatest feats of synergy the business world has ever seen.
DRAGONWAGON REGIONAL, ROUND TWO
#12 Chosen Roach vs. #4 Chardonnay Beaver
#11 Forbes Thor Kiddoo vs. #3 Quindarious Gooch
#7 Candida Seasock vs. #15 Yo'Heinz Tyler
CHROTCHTANGLE REGIONAL, ROUND TWO
#1 Dr. Narwhals Mating vs. #9 Mahogany Loggins
#5 Rev. Hobbit Forrest vs. #4 Beau Titsworth
#11 Hallelujah Lulie vs. #3 Dr. Taekwondo Byrd
#10 Gandalf Hernandez vs. #2 Shaka Licorish