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March 19, 2008

Odds of Developing a Perfect NCAA Basketball Bracket?

So how sure are you of your office pool picks? Are you convinced you have the perfect bracket? Every year, the question is asked, "What are the odds of selecting all the teams in the NCAA Tournament Pool correctly?"

Well, there are two ways to calculate that. The first is to assume that all teams are equal in quality, and develop a random bracket generator to get you the right answer. In that case, the odds of correctly selecting the perfect bracket is 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Or said differently "one in nine million trillion." (Yes. I wrote that right)

In terms of decimal points, it looks like this:
One in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808

The other way to do it. You could somehow weight each team based on the historical odds that a team of that seeding would advance. For instance:
  • The #16 seed has never beaten a #1 seed
  • The #2 seed has only lost four times to the #15 seed. And no #15 seed has ever won a second round game.
  • The #14 seed has beaten the #3 seed fifteen times, but the #14 seed has only advanced to the Sweet 16 twice. The Sweet 16 stat here is interesting because UGA is a 14 seed and because the UT-Chattanooga team that did it knocked UGA out of the tournament in Tubby's second year.
I have no idea how a weighted formula would work, but I've seen projections that this is still a probability in the hundreds of millions.

In case you are wondering, no major bracket selection web site (which process MILLIONS of brackets per year) has ever processed a perfect bracket. That includes Yahoo, ESPN and Sportsline. That's according to the WSJ (link in last sentence) and PBS.

PWD

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, that means: if every man, woman & child on the face of the Earth each filled out 1.4 billion brackets, someone would likely have one perfect bracket. I quit!

Anonymous said...

I'd bet it's about a 1 in 1 million chance in "real world" odds of picking it perfectly.

But the one in 9.2 quintillion version does present some funny possibilities, like all the millions of ways you could fill out your bracket where UGA beats Mt. St. Mary's for the championship. I got one of those on my bracket.

Anonymous said...

....move that team there...alright. I've got it.

saleebydawg said...

1 in 9 million trillion . . .

So you're tellin' me there's a chance!

 
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