Superbowl

I have been thinking about what to do with the numbers I get from this.

I think the tourney has still been impacted by higher and lower traffic days, like the low number of votes the Screech got in its first match.

There also seem to be many new names in the comments, so I don't know if we're picking up all new people from other communities from All or if we're getting the lurkers to be more vocal. If it's new people, they're going to be less familiar with some of these owls than the people who have been here the last 6 months of my posts.

So far my main idea is to total the whole number of votes at the end to give an overall general popularity score regardless of who actually wins.

I was also going to pick a few honorable mentions for more obscure owls that do better than I had expected. Sooty and Buffy Fish for example I didn't expect to clear their first matches.

There are also over 200 owl species that didn't make the tourney this year. I'll probably cut the bottom 10 or so contestants to make room for new owls next year, so if there's anyone you felt was left out this year, give them a shout out or just keep them in mind throughout the year and tell me I better add them or else!

The bracket is a good amount of work, and honestly I secretly hope some owls don't move on because some of these rare ones are hard to source b that many good photos of. There are so great owls where there's only like 100 of them risk in the world, but guess many different pics can I possibly get of them? 😅 I'm having tons of fun with this and love seeing you guys enjoy it, but it's a lot of prep every day, especially now that I'm not work from home anymore, so I'm going to be relieved when it's over! I absolutely DO want to do it again next year though!

But all of you feel free to let me know your thoughts if there's anything you'd like to see at the end of this or for next year.

Was this a good number of contestants or too many?

Do you want more common owls or did you like the mix this year? I tried to get every genus, but that was still too many, but I tried to get a fair number for you guys in Europe and AU/NZ and not make it too US biased.

The Picasso post kinda had me wanting to copy some of his owl art and put it on here as merch, but that also sounds like a lot of work. My brother has also been selling shirts for his private social club (coincidentally the Owls Club) and I helped him come up with potential future shirt designs for them and toyed around with c/Superbowl shirts, but all the grief and frustration with sizing and minimum order he's dealing with do it locally is not encouraging to me doing it intentionally, and I don't want to do things that don't benefit all of you equally. If any of you have experience with that, I could be interested, but dealing with random people online with money also has me a bit ehhhh. I'm just thinking out loud though.

Any other thoughts so far it in things you want to see this group doing in the coming year?

But does that make the Greater Sooty better than the Great Horned??? 😉