NCAA powerhouse Duke sits at number one in the March Madness bracket but will the team go all the way to the national championship game or will an underdog like Montana be able to cut down the net when the tournament is all said and done?
Sixty-eight teams are trying to make it to Minneapolis on April 8 and the chances of picking the exact teams that make it to the second round, then the Sweet 16, then the Elite 8 and Final Four before the national championship game could nearly be impossible. You would have to fill out 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 brackets to cover every possibility, according to the Washington Post.
And it would be impossible to fill out 9 quintillion brackets by hand. The NCAA said if you were even able to fill out 1 billion random brackets every second over 100 years, you'd only have about 3 quintillion done and would have 6 quintillion left to do.
A professor crunched the numbers and got a more reasonable number, saying that the odds of coming up with the perfect bracket, by making informed decisions, were 1 in 128 billion, according to the NCAA.
Credit: The Associated Press
Credit: The Associated Press
And don’t think your office bracket that’s being passed around is the only way to make some quick cash on the games.
The American Gaming Association says 47 million Americans will bet about $8.5 billion on the tourney this year and only half will be in bracket pools. The rest will either be through a bookie, a sportsbook online or in person, or between friends, the Post reported.
Get this - most of the money bet will be done illegally, CNBC reported.
More than $10 billion was gambled last year, and only 3 percent, or about $300 million, was done legally, according to CNBC.
The American Gaming Association found that pool betting was illegal in 37 states in 2018.
History of brackets
Brackets aren't anything new, or even a brainchild of the NCAA. Apparently the first bracket was created in 1851 for a chess tournament, Slate found out. The NCAA held its first bracket in 1939 during the first tournament. It was a group of eight teams in a single-elimination format with two regions, according to the NCAA.
But they didn't start being the thing to do in offices and between friends until 1977. That's when a bar in Staten Island printed out the bracket and 88 people filled them out, seeing who was the best at predicting the champ, according to the Smithsonian.
Credit: AP Photo/Chuck Burton
Credit: AP Photo/Chuck Burton
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