The Odds Of A Perfect Bracket Can't Even Be Comprehended
(CBS) By now, your bracket surely has red ink through it if it's not completely busted, but at some point before Thursday's games started, you may have been holding out hope that you would be the genius who picked a perfect bracket and won $1 billion from Warren Buffett.
Well, just how unlikely is that? As these first 28 or so hours of the NCAA Tournament have shown, it's hard to predict chaos. As in like a 1-in-9.2 quintillion chance to perfectly predict all the chaos and winners correctly, according to the Washington Post and the smart people who crunch those types of numbers.
What's 9.2 quintillion, you ask? That's 9.2 billion a billion times over.
For more context, we turn to a USA Today piece that puts the chances of a perfect bracket in layman's terms by referencing dinosaurs:
If everyone on earth filled out 100 brackets, it would theoretically take 13 million years to get a perfect bracket. If all the world's population filled out just one bracket, it could take 1.3 billion years. That means dinosaurs that lived 65 million years ago could have been filling out brackets and we'd still just be 5 percent of the way to perfection.
Mercer's upset of Duke on Friday afternoon left just 2,185 perfect brackets out of the more than 11 million entrants in ESPN's Tournament Challenge, USA Today reported.
So don't feel bad if your bracket is toast. Instead, cheers to the rest of the club.
