Ncaa bracket how many possibilities

But we still have a long way to go. Now imagine a new picture where each one of those dots in the picture above contained one million dots itself. One million million dots. Also known as a trillion. A group of researchers at the University of Hawaii estimated that there are 7.

If we were to pick one of those at random, and then give you one chance to guess which of the 7. These numbers are way too large to fully wrap your head around, but here are a handful of other statistics for reference, compared to 9. Others have tried to refine the rough estimate. Georgia Tech professor Joel Sokol that's him above has worked for years on a statistical model to predict college basketball games, and he says that the best models we have today are only right three quarters of the time, at best.

Which is partly what makes people think that about a quarter of tournament games are upsets. Sokol said that using a model that predicts regular-season games correctly 75 percent of the time would give you odds of getting a perfect bracket anywhere between 1 in 10 billion to 1 in 40 billion. Much, much better than 1 in 9.

So high that Sokol doesn't believe it will ever happen. For any matchup between unevenly seeded teams, the odds are adjusted to favor the lower-seeded team by about 3 percentage points for every 1-point difference in the seeds. Our source code is available on GitHub. Write to Chris Wilson at chris. Will Any of Them Be Perfect?

By Chris Wilson. Related Stories. ESPN reports that 70 million tournament brackets were completed in To put this in perspective, there were approximately million ballots cast in the presidential election.

Bergen's advice for these millions of March Madness hopefuls is simple: Be smart, and expect to lose. So is everyone else's," he says. Check out this infographic created by WalletHub for more March Madness statistics:. Next, we have a half of a region. We have two of those previous bracket chunks — each with eight possible configurations — and two ways to pick who goes on to the Elite Eight. This means we have 8 times 8 times 2 possible configurations, or possible ways to fill out this section.

Maybe someone in your office got one of these perfectly! One region has two of those smaller chunks — with combinations each — plus two choices in the last game. This gives us times times 2 possible configurations, or 32, ways to fill out a division.

You filled out eight of these. It is half as likely as randomly selecting a resident of the Americas and having that person be Bill Murray.