Best two days of the year!! Non-stop basketball. My current situation is a lot different than when I was working in NC. Back then it was like a sate holiday where all TVs has it on including all the TVs in the bank. Now I'm lucky if I can fight the HGTV people to get it on in the break room. Thank goodness for the internet.

More so than in previous years, I really think this will be a crazy bracket. I just don't think there is an "it" team. Duke, KY, TN, NC, Virginia, even LSU, Mich, or Mich St all have a chance (IMO). It will mostly come down to which team decides to show up and which one decides to stay home.

It is the best THREE days of the year: The NCAA Wrestling tournament is Thursday - Saturday!

a bunch of sweaty men wearing tights rolling around and grappling with each other...yeah, whats not to like...

I see 1 guy still has a perfect bracket going into the sweet 16, which may be the first time ever.

Hopefully he works for a Berkshire Hathaway company. If he does, he would get 1MM a year for life!

Those "quintillion to one odds" ideas about a perfect bracket are malarkey though....they're treating it like a lottery, as if every team in there has the same chance to win a game. Don't get me wrong...it's extremely tough.....but treating Duke vs. Grambling as an even money proposition is funny...........Getting a 75% or 80% winning pct. on a bracket is pretty easy to do......

It's closer to 1:2.4 Trillion! Much more attainable

https://math.duke.edu/news/duke-math-professor-says-odds-perfect-bracket-are-one-24-trillion

I see no way to calculate any true odds......one year's (or one region's) #1 seed doesn't equate to a different #1 seed and the same with the #16 seeds or whatever.

I think getting a perfect bracket is much easier than hitting the powerball.

I've been running a pool for 12 years..............if you're not around 48-50, you're not sniffing winning. Being perfect requires another 13-15 wins.........extremely difficult, sure.... but again, trillions or quintillions to one sounds high to me.

Agreed, but at the same time... people have won the powerball! Nobody's ever had a (confirmed) perfect bracket.

Yes, but i think the number of people playing powerball tickets exceeds the number of people filling out and confirming their brackets. Tens if not hundreds of millions of people play the powerball EVERY DAY (and when you consider that many of them are playing many, many tickets...the number of tickets at times can be in the billions). If there were a mythical March Madness tournament that could get completed every day, and you give people multiple shots at it--i.e., you can play as many brackets as you want.... someone would have a perfect bracket....on multiple occasions.

I certainly don't know about the odds, or how you could come up with a reliable number. But I am of the opinion that you are more likely to hit the Powerball. I have had good years with brackets, hitting your overall win percentage of 75 - 80. Had all 4 final four teams a few times. Had both championship teams and the champion as well. But hitting every single game, every single major upset??? When all sources everywhere tell you team A will absolutely win and team B simply doesn't stand a chance? Just ask Virginia, team B just might pull off the impossible. If that game is played another 499 times Virginia wins - but it just happened to be that long-shot 500th game. Loyola making the final four - never going to happen! Except it did.

Not counting the First Four, you still have to pick 63 games correctly. 8/9 and 7/10 games are hard enough, since those are usually pretty even matchups. But then you have to pick the right upsets, too. What 11 team(s) will win against the 6? It's almost a guarantee at least one 12 seed will win, but which one? This year it happened 3 times. 13 seeds aren't uncommon either - so when do you pick that? And in what year? It's been a while since a 15 has beaten a 2, so it's likely coming up in the next season or two - but in what year? And just what 15 do you pick that you truly think has a chance?

There are just too many variables, unknowns. What 1 or 2 seed lost a key player in the conference tournament? What 6 or 7 seed gelled at just the right time, blew through that conference championship and is playing at incredible heights? How far can that streak extend? Will the pressure build? Will they fall to sheer weight of numbers when they are forced to play 6 or 7 guys for 40 minutes versus a team with a deep bench?

I just don't see those odds as too unrealistic.

Raitchjay - fair point. I didn't think about that! I guess in theory, even allowing someone to fill out as many brackets as they wanted would guarantee a win... you just have to have the time to do 9.2 quintillion

Burkemi - so... you're saying I wasn't crazy to pick my Alma Mater Bradley University to win it all??

honestly, i have a perfect bracket this year, and i will be more than happy to provide it as proof to everyone once the tournament is completed. there is no reason to provide it sooner as someone will say "well, it's perfect now but that doesn't mean one of your pics won't lose later."

just let me know where to send it after the tourney is over...

Oh no...you're completely crazy if you did that!

And on the flipside, if someone has enough money/time to do it - he/she could also guarantee a win at the Powerball, too.

Burkemi...i'm certainly not saying it's "easy"....i'm just saying those "quintillion to one odds" seem ludicrous to me. I could go deeper into why (and i touched on the multiple brackets thing)....but we can disagree about it...that's ok.

I'll just add this: i have no idea how many brackets are filled out each year....let's say 75,000,000. Let's say we let one knowledgeable person do 75,000,000 brackets (because the quintillion to one thing is just supposed to be about how impossible it is). That person of course wouldn't pick all 75,000,000 randomly....they'd weight things by probability, etc. You don't think that person could get ONE perfect bracket out of their 75,000,000? I mean.....some of this is skewed by people with virtually no knowledge of college basketball filling out a bracket every year.

raitch - as you said, we can certainly disagree.

If one person fills out 75,000,000 brackets, sure the chances of filling out one perfect bracket increases dramatically. And if a person purchases 75,000,000 Powerball tickets, those chances increase dramatically as well.

I'm not saying it's impossible - just extremely improbable. For the Powerball OR the bracket.

According to a 2013 USA Today article, the 1 - in - 9.2 quintillion odds are strictly mathematical with each team having equal odds against any and all opponents (we agree and already know this). But according to DePaul math professor, that's an incomplete truth. In depth knowledge of the game and selecting a few "certainties" (i.e. #1 always advancing to the 2nd round) has an obvious impact. He calculates the odds at closer to 1 in 128 billion. And according to Wikipedia, the odds of winning Powerball are 1 in 292 million per ticket played.

But the difference in one person filling out 75,000,000 brackets and someone buying 75,000,000 powerball tickets is that the number 1 has no advantage over the number 16 in powerball......each number is created equally. Each number is not created equally in the tournament.

And i'm certainly not saying it's easy....i'm saying that it's skewed by a) people with no clue filling out a bracket every year (myself included...i don't really follow college basketball anymore) and b) the most knowledgeable people only able to fill out 1 bracket.

I did some fun looking up stuff. I edited my post ^^^. The numbers are still staggering.

Yes...i'm just saying that i think the true odds are impossible to calculate and would be different every year. But no doubt the odds are long...i don't dispute that....but you can't accurately say "South Carolina has a 72% chance to beat Clemson"......it's not a mathematical calculation like random numbers in a hopper getting picked.

On that, I'll completely and unequivocally agree. Kind of goes with my aggravation of the "experts" and computer simulations used in determining the BCS playoffs (and that term is used only VERY loosely). Games aren't played on paper.

https://www.thoughtco.com/march-madness-statistics-3126162

Thought you guys might find this interesting - it's about halfway down, but as expected, the greater the difference in seeds, the higher the win % of the higher seed. Kind of ties back into what we're talking about here!

Cool read.