Bracket Statistics

This year I will come in dead last (8of 8) in the March Madness family bracket contest.  The official contest run by D'Lane through CBSsports.com website has been recorded since 2008 (I was last in that year also).   I did have a moment of glory in first place in 2010 when I was lucky enough to pick Duke as the Champion.

This year everyone became a statistician when Warren Buffet insured Quicken Loan's Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge.  Everyone that talked about the probabilities cited incorrect statistics - but they had the concept right -  it wasn't going to happen.  The chance of randomly predicting the outcome of the main draw's 63 games is one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808  (you could round it to 9 quintillion and be close enough).  Now the other variables are that no one picks totally randomly (and rightly so).  Also Warren Buffet limited his risk by insuring only 15 million entries. 

Actually there was one non entry on Yahoo's Bracket site that perfectly picked the first 36 games but was foiled by the Dayton/Syracuse matchup (Dayton upset Syracuse).  But even his bracket must have been picked "from the heart" since he had Michigan and Michigan St. as the final two.

Actually the best part of this years March Madness is that the word Quintillion was actually said more than it has been said in the last "ump-tillion" years combined. 


PS  - Quintillion is any number with 18 zeros behind it  10^18.   And for those mathematicians in the group that is a million times a trillion  (10^6 * 10^12)  =  10^(6+12) = 10^18