If you're holding out hope that this is the year you're finally going to break through and get that perfect NCAA tournament bracket, you may need to wait a while. Like, a few billion years.
The odds of you filling out a perfect bracket this year are a staggering 1 in 9.2 quintillion. That's a nine with 18 zeroes or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 if you're not into the whole rounding thing.
How big is that?
That's one billion, 9.2 billion times.
It's 500,000 times more than our $17 trillion national debt.
You'd have a better chance of hitting four holes-in-one in a single round of golf.
The 1 in 9.2 quintillion number is straight mathematics. It figures out how many possible ways the 63 game results on your bracket could be filled out. (Two to the sixty-third power.)
But it doesn't account for standard basketball logic, like No. 1 seeds always advancing in the first round or tournament champions usually having a top-four seed or Duke's dual advantage of having a legend like Coach K and never getting called for a blocking foul. If you know something about the NCAA tournament, the odds of a perfect bracket are more like 1 in 128 billion. (That's according to DePaul math professor Jay Bergen.)
Using that number, if everyone in the United States filled out a bracket, we'd see a perfect one every 400 years.
