What are the odds of creating a perfect March Madness bracket?

Answer 1

The quick answer: Not great.

The long answer: A modern NCAA bracket attempts to predict the outcome of 63 games, and that means there are a lot of variables that will probably ruin your "perfect" bracket. With each new bracket, the number of possibilities increases exponentially.

Assuming that all of the possibilities are equal, your chances of randomly selecting a perfect bracket are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. To put that another way, it's about 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

But that's assuming that you're picking teams at random. If you're a Basketball fan, you've got a good idea of which teams will make it to the final rounds, and you're not going to pick randomly-you know that the 1st seed will probably beat the 16th seed, for instance. You'll therefore have a much better chance of getting a perfect bracket.

Don't start counting your winnings just yet. Joel Sokol, a Georgia Tech professor, has spent years of his life developing a statistical model capable of creating the best possible NCAA bracket.

"In general, about 75 percent is where you'll get for essentially any model," Sokol told the NCAA's Bracket IQ blog. "Any of the best ones. Which is partly what makes people think that about a quarter of tournament games are upsets."

Sokol estimates that his a decent statistical model has a significantly better chance of picking a perfect bracket-somewhere between 1 in 10 billion to 1 in 40 billion. That's a massive improvement over a truly random model, but it's still effectively impossible.

"Even the most optimistic number I've seen, which is about 1 in 2 billion, that means give or take, if you want a 50-50 chance of ever seeing it in your life, you have to go through 1 billion NCAA tournaments," Sokol said. "And you might say, well there's millions of people filling these brackets out every year, but really there's not that much variation in the brackets, compared to how many there could be."

Investor Warren Buffet regularly offers huge rewards to anyone who can beat the odds. In 2019, the billionaire is offering $1 million per year for life for a perfect Sweet 16 bracket, reported CBS Sports.

The catch? The offer is only available to Buffett's employees. The other catch? Even if you're an optimist, the chances of a perfect bracket are extremely long.