Sweet 16
Sweet 16
[The comic shows a direct elimination bracket (a single-elimination tournament): there is a single match played by every pair of teams, and the winners of those matches are paired up for the next round of matches, this continues until there are no more matches to be played. There are sixteen teams described here (hence the number in the title), eight on each side of the empty rectangle in the middle. Every two teams are connected, these connectors are then also connected, these connectors are yet again connected, and a final pair of connectors, after making one counter-clockwise right angle turn, end up in the top and bottom edges of the central rectangle. The bracket is empty, no results of any of the matches are indicated.]
[These are paired.] A school with a dog on their team A school whose team is entirely dogs [These are paired.] A dog team with one human A dog team with one cat [These are paired.] A baseball team playing basketball A basketball team with baseball gear [These are paired.] NBA2K17 top players NBA2K17 top developers [These are paired.] The 1988 Los Angeles lakers Four kindergarteners and Lebron James [These are paired.] Boxers playing basketball Basketball players in boxing gloves [These are paired.] A team playing on stilts A team playing on Segways [These are paired.] A bad team that would make a good Cinderella story A good team playing in glass slippers

March Madness , with its championship played on the day this comic was published, is a colloquial name for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament, which features 68 American college basketball teams in an elimination bracket. Due to the setup, the 16 teams that make it to the third round of the tournament (or fourth if counting the "First Four") are sometimes called the "Sweet 16", hence the title. Winning a third round game means that a team is part of the "Elite Eight," who can win to move on to the "Final Four," and then to the championship game, where a winner is crowned.
This is the second time Randall has made a bracket with strange opponents meeting each other in a bracket; the first was 1529: Bracket and brackets were mentioned a second time in 2131: Emojidome . References to basketball is a recurring subject on xkcd, as is Randall's lack of interest for sport in general .
In this comic, the bracket, see details below , of the final 16 is not filled in with actual college team names, but descriptions of the odd circumstances of each team. For example, the first team is "a school with a dog on their team", a reference to Air Bud . The team descriptions become increasingly bizarre, comprising varied sports and pop culture references and often building on and playing off of previous team descriptions.
The first four teams on the left are composed partially or completely of animals, which are most likely pets, but could be animals for assisting disabled persons, emotional support animals, police dogs, feral cats, etc. The next two teams consist of some form of baseball -basketball crossover. The bottom two teams on the left feature developers and players of NBA 2K17 , a basketball video game by 2K Games.
The first team on the right, the 1988 Los Angeles Lakers is an actual historical NBA team; though the particular team from 1988 would not exist today, it could be a team of the same players, who would now be in their mid-50s or 60s. They are paired against a team of four kindergartners and current Cleveland player Lebron James (born 1984), who was also a kindergartner in 1988. James was considered the best active NBA player as of 2017. Ironically, LeBron James has since become a Laker, as of the 2019-20 NBA season; he has become the first NBA player to win a championship in 3 different teams (having previously won titles with the Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers).
The next two teams feature basketball- boxing crossovers. The bracket after that features teams on unconventional mobility aids, Segways and stilts .
The final two teams are Cinderella teams . A Cinderella story is when a weak team works hard to achieve success. The final team consists of players wearing glass slippers, often a part of the Cinderella fairy tale.
The title text explains what the heck Randall was doing to make this comic: Randall is incredibly out of touch with sports, or at least their traditions. During March Madness a popular pastime is to take a look at the starting bracket of all 68 teams and speculate who will win each round. This activity is sometimes associated with gambling, where the person with the most correct bracket could potentially win money. Randall, when handed a blank bracket, instead fills it with teams he wants to see play rather than who is actually in the tournament. A bracket is considered "busted" when a number of predicted teams lose earlier than expected. In this case, since Randall's Sweet 16 does not include any of the real teams participating in the tournament, his bracket is busted from the beginning.
As neither this comic from April 3rd or the previous comic, 1818: Rayleigh Scattering from March 31st was one of Randall's April fools' comics , this was the first year since 2010 with no April Fools' Day comic. See more on this in the Trivia section for the previous comic.
Two years later in 2019 the April Fools' comic 2131: Emojidome , was using such a bracket as above to match 512 emojis to find the best emoji. Same time of year, so probably again a reference to March Madness.
[The comic shows a direct elimination bracket (a single-elimination tournament): there is a single match played by every pair of teams, and the winners of those matches are paired up for the next round of matches, this continues until there are no more matches to be played. There are sixteen teams described here (hence the number in the title), eight on each side of the empty rectangle in the middle. Every two teams are connected, these connectors are then also connected, these connectors are yet again connected, and a final pair of connectors, after making one counter-clockwise right angle turn, end up in the top and bottom edges of the central rectangle. The bracket is empty, no results of any of the matches are indicated.]
[These are paired.] A school with a dog on their team A school whose team is entirely dogs [These are paired.] A dog team with one human A dog team with one cat [These are paired.] A baseball team playing basketball A basketball team with baseball gear [These are paired.] NBA2K17 top players NBA2K17 top developers [These are paired.] The 1988 Los Angeles lakers Four kindergarteners and Lebron James [These are paired.] Boxers playing basketball Basketball players in boxing gloves [These are paired.] A team playing on stilts A team playing on Segways [These are paired.] A bad team that would make a good Cinderella story A good team playing in glass slippers
