March Madness or Powerball/Mega Millions: Which odds are better?

The Mega Millions jackpot is at $345 million for Friday's drawing.

The Mega Millions jackpot is at $345 million for Friday's drawing.

UPDATE [11:12 p.m.]:  The winning Mega Millions numbers were 1, 13, 26, 33, 52 and the gold Mega Ball number is 11.

ORIGINAL STORY: It's the season for March Madness, so here's some more.

Which is harder to do, win the jackpot of the Powerball or Mega Millions lotteries, or pick a perfect NCAA basketball tournament bracket?

Not close, as it turns out.

The odds of predicting all the tournament games correctly are 1 in 128 billion, according to DePaul professor Jeff Bergen.

By comparison, the Mega Millions jackpot odds are 1 in 302.5 million, and for Powerball it’s 1 in 292.2 million, according to their respective websites.

Now that you know the odds, you should know that the lotteries’ combined jackpots are at $800 million — $455 million for Powerball and $345 million for Mega Millions.

That's a lot of money, but it's still behind the $1 billion-plus combined jackpot total from January.

The drawings for Mega Millions (Friday) and Powerball (Saturday) can be seen at 11 p.m., right before the Channel 2 Action News Nightbeat.

In other news: