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NCAA March Madness Brackets: May the Odds Be Never In Your Favor

  • Mike Schultz's Author profile. Mike Schultz

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Prior to the beginning of the 2014 NCAA Men’s basketball tournament, Quicken Loans and Warren Buffet ran a promotion that would pay out $1 billion to any individual that could fill out a perfect bracket. Despite no one winning the pot last year, Quicken Loans and Buffet did not offer the same deal in 2015. It wouldn’t have made much of a difference, as there isn’t a single perfect bracket remaining.

The odds of picking every winner during March Madness is nearly impossible. The closest anyone with a documented bracket has come was a bracket that was completed by a 17-year-old boy name Alex Hermann in 2010, who accurately picked every game up until the Sweet Sixteen round of play. With 11.57 million brackets completed in 2015 on ESPN.com, heading into the round of 64, the pursuit of perfection ended in the round of 32.

Sports Interaction’s NCAA March Madness Betting

While there are no prospects of a perfect bracket, March Madness has put one person in the unlikely position to win quite a bit of money. The owner of The D and Golden Gate Hotels in Las Vegas, Derek Stevens, put $20,000 on the no. 7 seed Michigan State Spartans to win the National Championship. Michigan State had just 50/1 odds to win when Stevens placed the bet on December 5th, but the Spartans have defied those odds, making it to the Final Four.

Despite their unlikely run in the tournament, the Spartans are still a long shot to win the title. Their odds have improved since December, going from 50/1 to 8/1 heading into their game against Duke. In comparison, the no. 1 overall seed and favorite to win the tournament, the Kentucky Wildcats, currently have 2/3 odds of winning it all.

The Spartans still have a better chance of winning the National Championship than someone picking all 64 games correctly. According to several oddsmakers, the chance of accurately picking the winner of every game during the NCAA tournament is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. To put that more succinctly, the odds are 1 in about 9 quintillion. Good luck!