Christy Hovanetz, Ph.D., is a Senior Policy Fellow for ExcelinEd focusing on school accountability and math policies.
Here’s a math fact: There are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 different ways you can complete the 64-team March Madness bracket for this month’s college basketball tournament.
That means you have about a 1 in 9.2 quintillion—or 1 in 263—chance of picking the “perfect bracket,” or correctly predicting the outcome of every game throughout the tournament.
For reference, if you filled out 1 billion random brackets every single second for 100 straight years, you would still be 6 quintillion brackets shy of 9.2 quintillion. Still hard to quantify? There are only 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on all the Earth’s beaches and deserts—that’s 1.7 quintillion fewer than all the bracket possibilities!
The sports bracket isn’t new. It was first used in 1851 when British chess champion Howard Staunton organized the world’s first single-elimination international chess tournament for the Great Exhibition in London. (We can debate later about the sportiness of chess.*)
Staunton created the bracket with random pairings, with the winners randomly drawing their opponent for each upcoming round until a champion was crowned. He believed this approach would result in the two best chess players facing each other for the final game.
But that didn’t happen.
As contestants pointed out, there was fault in Staunton’s logic. That’s because the random draws sometimes resulted in two of the best players competing in the first round and one being eliminated, while two less skilled players were sometimes paired, guaranteeing one would advance. To solve this, they came up with the idea of ranking, or “seeding,” the contestants to ensure the best two players had a chance to battle it out in the championship game.
Seeding is still used today, and it’s how team pairings are made for the March Madness bracket. Teams are rewarded for their performance during regular season play, with the better teams earning a higher seed. Their reward is playing lower-ranked teams in the first round.
By knowing a little bit about basketball, like seeding, and adding in a little math (specifically, regression analysis), you can increase your odds of picking a successful bracket. By factoring in basketball’s many, many variables—such as wins, losses, home court advantage, field goals made, free throws made, number of three-pointers, experience of players, coaches’ years of experience, team rank, offense rank, defense rank, region rank, minutes played, etc.—you can model outcomes and relationships and therefore improve your bracket picks.
Using statistical methods, researchers have reliably picked about 70 percent of the games correctly, compared to the average of just under 62 percent. Even with all the data available to make more informed decisions, the late DePaul professor Jeff Bergen still figured the odds of picking a perfect bracket is 1 in 128 billion.
Since 1985, with the creation of a 64-team playoff bracket, no perfect bracket has ever been recorded. The longest a bracket has stayed perfect was when Gregg Nigl, a neuropsychologist from Columbus, Ohio, had the first verified bracket ever to remain perfect through to the Sweet 16, the tournament’s final group of teams playing for the national championship. His bracket correctly predicted the first 49 games of the 2019 tournament.
These super-long odds might be why investor and billionaire Warren Buffett confidently offered $1 billion in 2014 to anyone completing the perfect bracket, which no one did. He’s still rumored to offer employees $1 million a year for life every March when basketball madness comes around.
March is the perfect month to stop the madness around declining math performance. Don’t pawn off this task to your mate. Check out ExcelinEd’s fundamental principles and comprehensive K-8 math model policy—resources based on findings from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel—to pick a winning policy.
*Chess is competitive, requires extensive skills, is physically demanding, promotes international fervor—and was officially recognized as a sport in 1999 by the International Olympic Committee. Although advocates persistently promote the inclusion of chess as a medaling sport at the Olympics, it will not be debuted in Paris 2024. Maybe Los Angeles in 2028?
Did you know?
A sports bracket is called a bracket because, well, the contestants are paired up via lines that look like punctuation brackets ] [. You can view a bracket—and follow this year’s tournament results—on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) website.
