The chances of picking a perfect March Madness aren’t great, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your research and win your NCAA Tournament pool.
In a 2012 YouTube video posted by DePaul University, math professor Jeff Bergen explains the odds of picking a perfect bracket for the annual NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball tournament — AKA March Madness — are 1 in 9,233,372,036,854,775,808.
In case you’re not even sure how to say that number out loud, that’s less than a 1 in 9 quintillion chance of picking every single game correctly. In other words, there are over 9.2 quintillion possible combinations of outcomes.
This means the odds of picking the winners of all 63 games are so close to impossible that it was a pretty safe bet in 2014 when billionaire investor Warren Buffet and Quicken Loans offered to pay a $1 billion prize to anyone who could pull it off.
In fact, as the NCAA proudly likes to remind us year after year, since the first known bracket pool was started in a Staten Island bar in 1977, no one has ever picked all 63 games of the tournament correctly in spite of the millions upon millions of brackets submitted every time March Madness rolls around.
However, if you’re making educated guesses or, as Bergen puts it in the video if you “know basketball,” then according to his calculations your chances improve dramatically—to about 128 billion to 1.
So it does benefit your odds to have a working familiarity with how teams are performing going into the tournament, the discrepancies in ability level between the teams, and statistical trends and anomalies that have borne out over the tournament’s history. For example, you can almost always count on a “Cinderella” team to come out of left field and upset one or more teams.
Tips to remember when filling out your March Madness bracket
There are also myriad quirky facts to consider. 12-seeds, for example, have beaten 5-seeds 51 times since the NCAA Tournament field expanded in 1985.
Going into this year’s tournament, which commences on Sunday, March 13 (complete schedule and broadcast info here), 5-seeds are 51-93 against 12-seeds, equating to a 35.42 win percentage, according to the NCAA. Knowing these facts helps, but you still pretty much have a snowball’s chance of picking the perfect bracket.
For most who go through the ritual of trying, though, the stakes aren’t nearly as high as winning a billion dollars or even achieving perfection. The chance to win some petty cash, the excuse to have some fun with friends or co-workers, and the simple satisfaction of out-doing the people you know is enough to keep coming back year after year.
And today more than ever, there’s an abundance of resources to turn to aside from the ever-churning sports talk analysis that kicks into high gear in the weeks leading up to “the big dance,” another affectionate nickname for the tournament.
For 13 years, Davidson College math professor and “bracketology expert Tim Chartier has worked to develop models predicting the tournament’s outcome. The methods became so popular he began teaching them to middle school and high school students, as well.
His efforts to predict the bracket have garnered significant attention from media outlets such as The New York Times, Bloomberg and HuffPost, which explained Chartier’s weighting system enough that you can try your hand at “March MATHness” via Davidson’s website.
Renowned statistician and presidential election forecaster Nate Silver’s ESPN-affiliated blog FiveThirtyEight noticed Chartier’s work as well.
As Silver pointed out in a 2014 column on the site, to make his own March Madness predictions he relies on five different computer-generated rankings systems and two “human rankings” and then adjusts for variables such as travel distances and player absences due to injury and suspension.
Silver’s calculations require an understanding of the kind of complex mathematical analysis Chartier loves to teach. But all of the major sports media platforms offer voluminous analysis on rankings as well. What is perhaps so beguiling about numbers is that, for all their seeming rigidity, they don’t necessarily offer a window into hard truth so much as they provide a common language for a variety of interpretations.
A panel of basketball experts can all have the same information and come up with divergent explanations for what happens — and for what they expect to happen — on the court.
No clear super team could mean more upsets than usual in March Madness
As far as what we can expect this year, ESPN analyst and former Duke player/assistant coach Jay Bilas (also a lawyer who’s advocated for paying collegiate athletes) offered the following on a late-February appearance on The Rich Eisen Show:
"“Last year, we had two teams that stood out above the rest with Gonzaga and Baylor who were head-and-shoulders better than everybody. This year, we’ve got about eight teams that are prohibitive title favorites. So I think the champion will probably come out of that eight—but all of them can lose in the Sweet Sixteen [round] too. … We’ve got a number of teams that are really capable, but all of them have—I don’t want to say ‘flaws’ or ‘holes’—but [none] of them are powerful enough [for us] to say that they can have a bad outing in the Sweet Sixteen and survive it. In one way, it’s beautiful. Last year, if Baylor or Gonzaga had been beaten before the Final Four, I would’ve been shocked by that. But I won’t be shocked if any team gets beaten in the Sweet Sixteen this year. It may make it more delicious for a fan.”"
Uncertainty, of course, is not only part of the fun, but apparently also a fact of life when it comes to predicting the outcome of an event that has so many moving parts. Even Silver, famous for his accuracy at forecasting election outcomes, has a hard time with the tournament.
This puts you in good company if your picks don’t pan out — and gives you ultimate bragging rights if even a reasonable number of them do. Good luck!
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