Good Question: March Madness 'Reply All'
By taking the classic 64-team bracket, the number of possible outcomes for those games is 9 quintillion, 223 quadrillion. (Written out, that's 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.)
So if you did one bracket a second, it would take you 42 years to fill out all the combinations.
But this year it's different, because there are 4 play-in games. That minor change makes a major difference in the number of combinations. From 9 quintillion, to 147 quintillion! (Or 147,573,952,589,676,412,928.)
Wow.
The money actually goes to the conferences ... Big Ten, Big East, etc. According to the NCAA 2011 revenue distribution plan, each game a team is in is worth $1.4 million, that money gets paid out over a six-year period.
So you don't get money for winning the championship, but you do get money for losing your opening round. The conferences then distribute that money to the schools, typically it's pooled and distributed equally.
The term bounces back to high school basketball in Illinois - from an essay in 1939 called "March Madness." It was written by a member of the Illinois High School Association, writing about the high school tournament.
CBS Sports announcer Brent Musberger is given credit for making the term popular in the college hoops tournament in the early 1980s.
The NCAA didn't get the trademark to March Madness until 1996. They had to sue to get it from a video game company.
Baseball coaches are the only ones to wear uniforms, because they used to be players too. In 1985, Pete Rose was a player and the manager of the Cincinnati Reds.
Basketball used to have player-coaches, guys like Bill Russell and Lenny Wilkens, but right now, that's against the terms of the NBA's contract with its players union.
