We started with 68 teams and now it’s 12. No doubt at least one of those 56 teams eliminated you wanted to move on, or thought they would move on. If your bracket is no longer perfect, you’re in good company. Like, 100% of your friends are there too.

Don’t feel too bad you didn’t pick a perfect bracket this year. The odds of doing such? I usually begin March by having my students try to guess. One out of a thousand? One out of a million?

More like one out of a million… then one out of a million… then one out of a million.

(Pause for effect.)

Yeah, that’s actually a pretty good estimate. Well, no, the real answer is almost 10 times as unlikely but you get the idea. It’s one out of 9.2 quintillion, give or take. That’s a 9 with 18 zeros.

Well, a little more than that, actually.

The number of possible bracket combinations is 10 times as big as the number of square inches on Earth. If an alien were firing a laser beam at random toward our planet he’d be 10 times as likely to hit a square inch I chose than arrive with a perfect bracket.

Still think you can do this some day?

Consider this.

Let’s say there were a lottery among every human on the planet. Your name was chosen at random.

But there was more to it.

To win you also had to correctly guess a random number.

Between one and a billion.

Actually that’s still lower than the number of perfect brackets, but it’s pretty close.

Kinda puts that Purdue loss in perspective, eh?

To hear more, check out today’s episode of Math and Musings.