"The term “billion” tends to be thrown around a lot these days: billions of years, billions of people, billions of dollars—especially dollars. The U.S. government has become quite chummy with the term and sum in recent times, spending billions of greenbacks with ease. However this March, the term became a household phrase once again for millions of sports fans around the nation.
"As if March Madness wasn’t already a huge deal in the sports realm, it became even bigger this month when investor Warren Buffett offered $1 billion dollars to anyone who could successfully fill out a perfect bracket.
"Until Buffett’s generous offer, for me, March Madness was just a phrase that was excessively thrown around on ESPN several weeks before baseball season came out of hibernation. Basketball is not my favorite sport, especially college hoops concerning large universities that I could care less about. But it’s not everyday you get a shot at a billion dollars for predicting the outcome of a few basketball games. So I signed up and joined the other ten million hopefuls around the nation seeking to win the big billion.
"The art of filling out a tournament bracket has become a science in of itself, with websites, TV, and radio programming dedicated to strategy and educated guessing. Casual sports fan that I am, I wrote up my bracket in five minutes by the seat of my pants. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky. After all, in 2011 NFL quarterback Matt Hasselbeck’s five-year-old son nearly pulled it off, maintain perfection into the third round and placing in the top 100 brackets out of 6 million that year. Young Hasselbeck made his picks based on the look of the schools’ mascots.
"What are the actual odds of winning it big with a blind pick? Probably like trying to predict word for word the contents of a book before the author writes it. A professor from DePaul University did the math: it’s roughly 1 in 9.2 quintillion (that’s 18 zeros). The odds are slightly better if you know anything about college basketball, which I don’t. I would mathematically have a better chance of winning the lottery, being struck by lightning, or playing professional basketball myself than receiving the golden check from Mr. Buffett. Maybe Warren is smarter than we thought.
"Needless to say, it is no surprise that it’s never been done: the world has yet to see a perfect bracket. This year, with upsets by Harvard, Dayton, Stanford and North Dakota State, the overwhelming majority of potential perfect brackets were destroyed in the first round—including mine.
"At the end of the day, the same ten million fans (including myself) will mostly like be right back in the same spot next March: glued to laptops and TV sets, rooting for their teams and filling their brackets. Putting aside all the numbers and the predictions and the upsets, ultimately we all just want to believe that today could be somebody’s lucky day. It’s worth a shot."
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