The BIRTHDAY MADNESS bracket: Here is the best birthday of them all

What’s the best five-person team you could build from nothing but people who share your birthday?

“But I don’t know which activity this five-person team would be built to do,” you might wonder.

“Quit stalling,” we would respond, “and answer the damn question.”

We posed this question to our readers, and they responded with thousands of five-person Birthday Sibling crews.

So built a BIRTHDAY SIBLINGS MADNESS bracket. We sorted through all the submissions that actually included the relevant birthdate, narrowing the field to 64 formidable teams.

We then left it to public balloting.

A few fast notes:

1. We are trusting a combination of public knowledge and Wikipedia (itself a combination of public knowledge) on these birthdays. Therefore any errors are the fault of everyone, not us. We’re all in this together.
2. Many people submitted teams that were almost identical, except for one or two names. Your selection committee carefully diligently parsed these tiny differences all the same.
3. Instead of seeding based on regular season win-loss records, which don’t exist, all matchups were based strictly on calendar order.
4. Here was the bracket. See below for each day’s full squad of birthday siblings.

It was clear from the opening round that the battle would come down to January 17’s forces of light (Muhammad Ali, Ben Franklin, Michelle Obama, Dwyane Wade, Betty White) vs. the bad boys of December 18 (Stone Cold Steve Austin, DMX, Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, Joseph Stalin).

And in the end, perhaps it was 12/18’s incredible character concerns (I mean ... it’s Stalin) that tipped the victory to 1/17 with an overpowering 61% of the championship vote.

Congratulations to January 17, officially the best birthday on the entire calendar.

Here was the full field, by the way, since we couldn’t find a way to cram all this into a bracket:

We selected these 64 for their vague combinations of undefined power, which could range from actual skill to legendary status to the sheer comedy of seeing DMX allied with Stalin.

But we excluded one January 22 team for having too much power.

And as for the worst birthday crew, Luke might be correct here.