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Weird Monday, March 18th 2013 at 4:30 pm

The Odds of Filling Out a Perfect NCAA Bracket Are Amazingly Bad

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It’s that time of year again, when chances are that some of you have been finagled into filling out a bracket for the NCAA March Madness Tournament. While this probably made sense to our readers who enjoy college hoops, for many of you, it was probably just an exercise in being cornered by a co-worker who talked very quickly, handed you a sheet of paper and took five of your dollars, an experience much like being mugged but with less bruising. If you’re intimidated, don’t be. In the interest of taking the pressure off, it helps to recall that it is statistically impossible to fill out a perfect bracket, so you’re just as well off having fun with it. Isn’t that a load off?

Granted, this video from DePaul University math professor Jay Bergen is from last year, but the math holds, showing that there are no less than nine quintillion ways to fill out a perfect bracket. Quintillion. With a Q and eighteen zeroes. All of a sudden, your odds look a lot… well, not better, but at least more even. And that’s something.

Oh, and if you want to genuinely stand a chance of not embarrassing yourself in front of your friends and co-workers and make sure you stay out of that last place spot, head on over to our friends at SportsGrid, who will be happy to get you up to speed.

(via YouTube)

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  • Enthusiast

    The odds are really bad and when you realize that the results are worth less than the paper they’re printed on, it makes you feel rather silly that you’re getting all worked up about games that college kids play.

    Well, it probably doesn’t. I’m sure some people think this is important. I’m sure the starving kids in Africa/China/India/whatever-region-we-use-to-guilt-kids-into-eating-what-we-put-on-their-plates-now are glad that we’re spending three quarters of a billion dollars to see kids run around. One day, they’d like to get enough to eat to be able to run around too, but they’re pretty sure no one would pay for that to happen, especially not American sports fans.

    /troll?

    Maybe I’m just mad no one paid to watch me play Magic: The Gathering in college.. who knows.

  • Doctor J.

    That video speaks to how many possible bracket combinations there are, NOT to your chances of filling one out. The good professor assumes the outcome of each game is 50/50 which, as any reasonably intelligent person knows, is not the case. The fact that many perfect brackets are filled out each year speak to this fact – that knowing that better teams will win games more often than poorer teams greatly increase your likelihood of selecting the correct outcome of any particular game.

  • andy

    There are actually no documented cases of anybody filling out a perfect bracket. Fox Sports is offering a prize of $1,000,000 to anybody who can fill one out. In fact with some basketball knowledge, such as a number 1 has never lost to a number 16, or a number 2 has rarely lost to a number 15 the odds are a bit lower, down to 1 in 128,000,000,000.

  • Anonymous

    What you have to do is enter the expected win probability (espn is doing it) for each team that’s favored to win- you cant calculate the true odds by expecting each scenario to be 50/50.

    That number is nowhere near the quintillions. I estimate it to be somewhere in the 100s of millions, which is no different than your typical lottery.