As mentioned earlier, this is the swan song for Tecmo Super Bowl's world championship — Tecmo Madison XII. This was notorious enough to get the tournament featured on this morning's SportsCenter on ESPN.
Around 5 p.m., group stage play concludes and 64 competitors will advance to the knockout stage. That field will be further winnowed to a group of eight, who then duke it out in a double-elimination stage.
The grand prize is more than $2,000, with significant amounts also paid to those reaching the semifinals. This is the last time someone can call themselves the world champion of Tecmo Super Bowl. So let's have a little music, something appropriately ... final.
Now, the livestream.
Watch live video from TecmoBowl on www.twitch.tv
Around 8 or 9 p.m. tournament co-founder Josh Holzbauer will begin elite eight competition with "A Reading from the Book of L.T." the biography of NFL Hall of Famer and Tecmo Madison patron saint Lawrence Taylor.
"Have you read that? I actually read the whole thing one year," co-founder and two-time champ Chet Holzbauer, a lawyer and an actually intelligent person, asked me. "I read it because I thought it would help me curry favor with the Tecmo Gods. That's how superstitious I felt."
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In last year's tournament, Derek Ruble of Indianapolis emerged from a field of 248 at Badger Bowl to claim his first Tecmo Madison title. He is the only player in this year's field to make the elite eight stage in each of the preceding two years. But Kyle "Regulator" Miller of Elkhart, Ind., the pound-for-pound greatest Tecmo Super Bowl player in the world, returns after a one-year hiatus. Mainstays Francis "Mort" Buennagel of Buffalo, Eric O'Dell of Detroit and Matt O'Toole of Grand Blanc, Mich. are back too.
For more on Tecmo Madison, see today's feature story, or watch last year's reading from The Book of LT, in which Josh Holzbauer discovered there is both an Old Testament and an New Testament full of teachings from Tecmo Super Bowl's baddest player.
