Much, much better than 1 in 9.2 quintillion, but still crazy high.
Sokol said that using a model that predicts regular-season games correctly 75 percent of the time would give you odds of getting a perfect bracket anywhere between 1 in 10 billion to 1 in 40 billion. Which is partly what makes people think that about a quarter of tournament games are upsets. It might be a little higher or a little lower, but give or take, it’s close to 75 percent, where the best models can pick out which teams are better than others and then it’s just a question of whether the ball bounces the right way, who is playing better that day, whatever, whether you get the upset that day or not.” "In general, about 75 percent is where you’ll get for essentially any model," Sokol said. Georgia Tech professor Joel Sokol (that's him above) has worked for years on a statistical model to predict college basketball games, and he says that the best models we have today are only right three quarters of the time, at best. Others have tried to refine the rough estimate. Your odds of success are approximately three million times greater than picking a perfect bracket.īut we’ve already said that the 1 in 9.2 quintillion figure is a bit disingenuous. Imagine that there was one single acorn hidden in one of those three trillion trees, and you were tasked with finding it on the first guess. As of 2015, the best estimates for the number of trees on the planet was three trillion.The Earth’s circumference is approximately 1.58 billion inches, so you’d have to walk around the planet 5.8 billion times.There have been 5 trillion days since the Big Bang, so repeat the entire history of our universe 1.8 million times.There are 31.6 million seconds in a year, so 9.2 quintillion seconds is a quick 292 billion years.These numbers are way too large to fully wrap your head around, but here are a handful of other statistics for reference, compared to 9.2 quintillion. If we were to pick one of those at random, and then give you one chance to guess which of the 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on the entire planet we had chosen, your odds of getting it correct would be 23 percent better than picking a perfect bracket by coin flip. We'd need 9.2 million of those new pictures to get 9.2 quintillion dots.Ī group of researchers at the University of Hawaii estimated that there are 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth. Now imagine a new picture where each one of those dots in the picture above contained one million dots itself. Like the NCAA tournament, our sample bracket will be a single-elimination tournament, but it will feature just four teams.īut we still have a long way to go. So how do we calculate this? We'll look at a small sample bracket first. What are your odds if you had a perfect 50-50 chance of guessing every game correctly? Well that would depend on the number of total possible bracket permutations for the tournament. We'll get to advanced calculations that attempt to take knowledge into account later on, but to get a better understanding, let’s first look at the most basic calculation. But that type of knowledge is near impossible to quantify or accurately factor into an equation. For instance, before UMBC’s historic upset of Virginia last year, it was practically a guarantee that all four 1 seeds would win their matchups (they’re still 135 for 136 through the modern tournament’s history), giving you four automatically correct games to start off with.
Your chances will increase with more knowledge of the current teams, the tournament’s history, and an understanding of the sport itself. 1 in 120.2 billion (if you know a little something about basketball).Here's the TL/DR version of the odds of a perfect NCAA bracket: But we’re pretty confident in saying that it won’t. Yes, it is technically possible, and even absurdly overwhelming odds don’t mean it couldn’t theoretically happen this year. BRACKETS: Print the official March Madness bracket
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