March Mascot Madness: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is March Mascot Madness?

March Mascot Madness is the national high school mascot championship run by High School on SI — Sports Illustrated's high school sports vertical, operated by SBLive Sports — as an annual bracket contest each spring. The format mirrors the NCAA Tournament: 64 mascots face off one-on-one, with the winner of each matchup advancing to the next round until a single champion is crowned.

• The bracket is seeded from results of roughly 50 state-by-state mascot contests held by High School on SI throughout the preceding months — state winners and top-vote-getting runners-up earn their spots.
• A play-in round (five teams competing for the final slots) may precede the Round of 64, trimming the broader field to exactly 64.
• All voting is free and requires no account or registration at si.com.
• The 2025 champion was the Center Point-Urbana Stormin' Pointers (Iowa) — a pointer dog mascot — defeating the Morse Shipbuilders (Maine) in the national final.
• Notable past deep-run mascots include the Key Obezags (Maryland — "gazebo" spelled backwards), the Frankfort Hot Dogs (Indiana), the Moorhead Spuds (Minnesota), and the Hesston Swathers (Kansas).
• High School on SI publishes a separate matchup article for each head-to-head pairing; voting is embedded directly in each article.

How does the March Mascot Madness bracket work — rounds, timing, and voting?

The contest is structured exactly like the NCAA men's basketball tournament: 64 mascots, paired by seed, competing head-to-head. The bracket advances in six rounds — Round of 64 (Round 1), Round of 32 (Round 2), Sweet 16, Elite Eight, Final Four, and Championship. Each round's matchups are published as separate articles at si.com; voting closes on a hard deadline date printed on the article.

Bracket rounds at a glance

To find the active vote for any round, search si.com for the school's mascot name or navigate to the High School on SI national section. Each round's article is published fresh — bookmarking an earlier matchup link does not take you to a later-round vote. Fans must locate each new article independently as the bracket advances.

How do high school mascots qualify for the national bracket?

Qualification flows from High School on SI's year-round state-level mascot programme. Throughout the preceding year, the outlet publishes mascot contest articles for individual states — voters in each state choose the best mascot in their state through public fan polls. State winners and the highest-vote-getting runners-up across all 50 states accumulate enough entries to fill the 64-team national field.

Selection is not purely mechanical. The editorial team at High School on SI determines the final bracket composition to maximise interesting matchups and geographic variety. A school that placed second in a highly competitive state may receive an at-large bid over a first-place finisher from a smaller field. Seeds are assigned by the editorial team based on perceived mascot strength, name recognition, and prior voting history.

Unusual, quirky, or historically interesting mascots carry a structural advantage — they generate more organic interest, more viral sharing, and more media coverage than generic animal mascots. The Frankfort Hot Dogs, Key Obezags, and Moorhead Spuds all reached the later rounds of the 2025 bracket in part because their unusual names drive curiosity clicks that a team named the Eagles or Tigers does not produce.

For state-level mascot contests and other local voting opportunities, see our national contest directory or the full USA contest hub.

Which mascots have competed — the most unusual entries in bracket history?

March Mascot Madness was built specifically to celebrate strange, creative, and historically loaded school nicknames. The bracket deliberately surfaces mascots with genuine stories behind them — agricultural equipment, food items, arcane words, occupation-based names — alongside the standard animal and warrior mascots that fill most American high school rosters.

Schools with unusual mascots benefit from a structural advantage in this bracket: curious strangers from outside the school community will vote for the more interesting name. The Cornjerkers, Nimrods, and Hot Dogs have all attracted out-of-state voters who simply found the name compelling — a dynamic that standard mascots like Eagles or Tigers cannot replicate.

How do you get more votes in March Mascot Madness?

The core mechanic is a hard deadline per round with no per-hour cap recharge — the school with more votes at close wins. The entire campaign question is volume and timing: how many real people can you reach with the direct article link, and how close to the deadline? For general tactics on building online contest votes, see our full guide; the bracket-specific notes below are what actually drives results here.

What moves vote totals in the bracket

• Share the direct si.com article URL immediately — not the school name, not a screenshot. Every extra friction step costs you conversions from the link.
• Alumni networks multiply reach exponentially. A school with decades of graduates has thousands of former students. A post in an active alumni Facebook group or a booster-club email list can produce more votes in 24 hours than weeks of individual outreach.
• Local media coverage compounds organically. A story in the local newspaper or TV station about the bracket run generates voting from people who weren't previously following the contest. The 2025 champion Center Point-Urbana Stormin' Pointers received coverage from The Gazette (Iowa) and local TV stations that directly boosted vote totals in the later rounds.
• Community Facebook groups and local forums. For smaller towns especially, a post framing the mascot bracket as hometown pride reaches adults who vote but don't follow high school sports closely — the Cornjerkers and Nimrods type of mascot is tailor-made for this framing.
• Coordinate a final 12–24 hour reminder push. Because there is no hourly cap, a mass reminder blast near the close time is the single highest-leverage move. Late votes count the same as early ones.

When organic reach is fully deployed and the matchup is still close, some school communities use paid promotion to reach additional real voters. Our sports fan poll votes service delivers paced, genuine votes suited to hard-deadline format contests like this one. For transparent pricing, see our pricing page.

Rules and the buy-votes question for March Mascot Madness

March Mascot Madness is a reader-engagement fan poll with no cash prize, no formal sweepstakes structure, and no regulatory prize-law framework. High School on SI states explicitly that voting polls are intended as a fun way to create fan engagement. For a broader look at online poll legality, see our how-to guide; the bracket-specific notes below are what matters for this contest.

The meaningful distinction in this contest — as in most online fan polls — is between automated scripts that circumvent detection and paid outreach to real human voters casting genuine votes. The former violates platform terms; the latter is structurally identical to a booster email reaching a larger audience. Whether that satisfies the spirit of the contest terms is a judgement each school community should make after reading the current article's rules.

Because the prize is recognition and community identity rather than cash, the risk calculus is reputational rather than legal. Many of the mascots that generate deep bracket runs do so precisely because their communities organise aggressively — that organised community energy is what the contest rewards.