Your Odds of Predicting the Perfect March Madness Bracket

                If you’re planning on filling out a March Madness bracket and trying to be the first person to be able to predict the college basketball tournament, you better make more than one bracket! No one has ever been able to correctly predict a perfect bracket since the bracket format was originated in 1985.

                The odds of predicting it perfectly are so unbelievably small that in 2017 Warren Buffet offered $1 million dollars a year to any Berkshire Hathaway employee who could predict the Sweet 16 teams of the NCAA tournament in March. All someone needed was the final 16 teams in the tournament in order to win the money! Berkshire Hathaway employed almost 400,000 people in 2017 and no one was able to do so.

                The only brackets recorded are those that have been submitted to game websites and companies where decisions remain fixed and un-adjustable.

                After tracking six major games at NCAA.com, Bleacher Report, CBS, ESPN, Fox Sports, and Yahoo!, there was only one bracket that was perfect through 39 of the 67 games in 2017. This bracket was the closest to perfect anyone has ever gotten. According to Forbes, the odds of predicting a perfect March Madness bracket come out to an estimation of 1 in 9.2 quintillion. So let’s just say you better be feeling lucky come submission day for your brackets.

                Here are some things that have better odds of happening than successfully predicting a perfect March Madness bracket:

1.       Getting struck by lightning (1 in 3000)

2.       An amateur golfer hitting a hole in one on a Par 3 (1 in 12,500)

3.       Winning an Olympic Gold Medal (1 in 662,000)

4.       Being canonized (1 in 20 million)

5.       Being killed by an asteroid impact (1 in 75 million)

6.       Winning the lottery (1 in 175 million)

7.       Becoming President of the United States (1 in 300 million)