ROCKFORD, Ill. (WTVO) — “Never tell me the odds!” a wise man named Indiana Jones once said, but every year millions of people fill out a bracket for the NCAA tournament hoping to win March Madness.
According to the NCAA, no one in the history of the tournament has ever filled out a verifiably perfect bracket.
But maybe this is your year!
The odds are against you, it turns out.
The NCAA says you have a 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (that’s 9.2 quintillion) chance if you guess, and a 1 in 120.2 billion chance if you know a little something about basketball.
The organization says a group of researchers at the University of Hawaii estimated that there are 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth.
In their example, if they chose one grain at random and asked you to guess which one they had chosen, your odds of getting it right would be 23% better than picking a perfect bracket.
The NCAA says in the past 8 years of its Bracket Challenge Game, winners have averaged 49.8 correct games.