Every passing March brings a few weeks of imminent satisfaction for two groups of people. First, we have the urologists, whose clientele multiply every year as scores of men across the country strategically schedule their vasectomies, knowing well in advance that they will have a few days to sit around the house and stare at their television screen. This brings us to our next group of March enthusiasts: college basketball fans.
March Madness is a sporting event like none other. For the 68 Division-One teams that are lucky enough to qualify for the tournament, by either winning their respective conference championship or by way of an at-large bid, the focus of an entire country falls on them. March Madness can make a small university from Nebraska into a nationally polarizing institution, but one must keep in mind that there is more to this internationally admired tournament than just the love of college basketball.
Every March brings a certain competitive spirit to make a sports fan out of any of us. As millions of people scramble to fill out their office March Madness brackets money changes hands at an exponential rate. Everyone loves to fill out a bracket for a shot at a few hundred bucks and office bragging rights, particularly at the mere cost of a ten or twenty dollar entrance fee. This year brought a new element of prize for simply filling out a bracket.
Warren Buffett, the revered “Oracle of Omaha,” offered a new prize for the first fifteen million entrants to his competition: one billion dollars for a completely perfect bracket, and one hundred thousand dollars to the top 20 runner-ups (if none were indeed perfect by the end of the tournament). At first glance, his pledge seems risky, even for someone like Buffett, who could afford to lose that much fifty times and still be a billionaire. But keep in mind that there has never been a recorded perfect bracket, and Buffett’s analytical prediction told him the odds of a divine perfect bracket this year were virtually zilch.
Alas, after only the first two rounds of this year’s tournament there are zero perfect bracket’s left in his fifteen million-person pool, and, for that matter, zero left in the entire country. How is this possible? 15 million people are failing to predict the outcome of 63 straight games year after year?
According to Jeff Bergen, a mathematician at DePaul University, the chance of randomly predicting the outcome of the main draw’s 63 games is one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. For the devoted college basketball fan, the odds decline to a modest one in 128 billion.
Just to put the mathematical randomness of March Madness into perspective, the last remaining perfect bracket in the entire country for this year’s tournament was held by Brad Binder. The 23-year-old from Illinois claimed he just “entered for fun to see what happened,”, and made his picks in a mere three and a half minutes.
Ironically, he did not even enter Buffett’s Billion Dollar Bracket. And, of course, his bracket is no longer perfect after the plethora of first and second round upsets. His casual success in this year’s March Madness brackets perhaps reinforces a reality for Buffet’s 15 million participants: that a shot in the dark for one billion dollars is just that, a shot in the dark.
