CHARLOTTE, N.C. — March Madness is officially here. The first round of the NCAA Tournament tips off on Thursday when Mississippi State and Michigan State hit the hardwood at Spectrum Center in Charlotte.
The massive 68-team tournament is one of the most beloved traditions in all of sports thanks to its upset-fueled unpredictability. The NCAA estimates people fill out 60 million to 100 million brackets each year in an attempt to predict every game to win money or bragging rights over friends, family or coworkers.
But what are the odds of a perfect bracket? Mathematicians have calculated that your chances of picking a perfect bracket are one in 9.2 quintillion. Written out, that's 9,223,372,036,845,775,808. Doing something one quintillion times is the equivalent to one billion people doing something one billion times. That means if all 7.7 billion people on Earth picked one billion brackets, all totally unique from each other, there would still be 1.5 quintillion unique brackets no one had picked.
The closest thing to a perfect bracket was found when a person's 2019 bracket correctly picked the first 49 games. According to the NCAA, the second best perfect record was a Yahoo! Sports bracket that picked each of the first 39 games of 2017 correctly.
Simply put, getting a perfect bracket makes winning the lottery look like tying your shoes.
Why is the NCAA Tournament so beloved? First, college basketball is much different than the NBA and the talent is way more spread out. From powerhouse programs like North Carolina and Duke that attract excellent players to smaller schools like Davidson and St. Peter's, March Madness has something for everyone. And when Cinderella shows up at the ball, you never know when you've got the next Steph Curry on your hands, and that's when the magic happens.
Remember, it's mostly 18- and 19-year-olds on these teams, bein watched by millions of people with millions of dollars on the line. A lot of the time, the close games have less to do with who's more talented and more about who can handle the pressure.
Mix it all together and you have the perfect equation for an upset.
TEGNA's Emery Winter contributed to this report.
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