Getty Image
March Madness is upon us, bros, which means that, for the last four days or so, we’ve all been filling out a bunch of brackets — 18 for me, to be exact — over-thinking matchups and going back-and-forth between deciding which team will be this year’s Cinderella. It’s all in good fun, of course, but, deep down, we all want to win big in an office pool for money, bragging rights and the sweet smell of victory.
While you may very well win your tournament challenge this year, it’s probably not going to be from a perfect March Madness bracket. Why? It’s not because I doubt your college basketball knowledge, but because the odds are way against you from having it happen. Just how bad are said odds? According to NCAA.com, the the odds of picking all 63 games in the NCAA Tournament correctly are an insane 1 in 9.2 quintillion. So, yeah, it doesn’t look to be too good for you.
Since I’ve wasted a bunch of time filling out brackets in preparation for this year’s March Madness, I really wanted to dive into these terrible odds a little bit more. That’s why I rounded up some insane things that are more likely to happen to a person than scoring a perfect March Madness bracket. Here are a a few of them.
- Being injured by a toilet: one in 10,000 odds
- Being struck by lightning in a year: one in 700,000 odds
- Becoming a billionaire in the United States: one in 785,166 odds
- Being killed by a shark: one in 3.7 million odds
- Getting drafted into the NBA: one in 6.8 million odds
- Becoming President of the United States: one in 10 million odds
- Becoming an Olympic gold medalist: one in 23.4 million odds
- Getting killed by a falling coconut: one in 250 million odds
- Winning the Powerball jackpot: one in 292 million odds
- Making eight half-court shots in a row: one in 39 trillion odds
- Guessing a nine-character password with an uppercase, a lowercase and a number on the first try: one in 14 quadrillion odds
- Sinking a hole-in-one, getting a 5-card royal flush in poker and winning $1 million in the lottery all in the same day: one in 4.2 quintillion odds
This is so depressing, it makes me feel like a real sack after putting so much time and energy into thinking, re-thinking and filling out all those brackets I’ve done all week. Oh well, I guess there’s a chance at hitting every game.
While all of us think we’ve got the perfect March Madness bracket every time we fill one out, the odds are so bad that you’re probably better off just flipping a coin and going with that. So, yeah, just watch the NCAA Tournament for fun and know that nobody out there is going to guess all the games right.