Bet, you didn’t even know that number existed.
As you college hoops fans are filling out your NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament brackets in hopes of winning the billion dollar prize Warren Buffett has offered for the perfect one, I just wanted to give you a few sobering statistics on your odds of winning via FTW.
Statistically speaking, the odds of getting a perfect NCAA tournament bracket are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
That’s 9.2 quintillion is 9.2 billion written 1 billion times. 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% of the way to perfection.
Getting back to the lottery comparison, you have better odds winning the Powerball jackpot (1 in 125 million) three times in a row than you do in getting a perfect bracket. Try and wrap your head around that.
Now that I’ve shot down all your hopes and dreams of winning a billion dollars, remember it’s much easier to win your office pool. Just keep in mind, don’t pick a #1 seed to go down in the first round (it never happens and you’ll just look dumb). And no matter how good you think your Kentucky Wildcats are, be realistic, they’re an 8th seed for a reason and a team seeded lower that 4th hasn’t won the tournament in 26 years when 6th seeded Kansas took home the title.
Happy March Madness