The statistics associated with correctly picking every winner of every game in the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament are in nobody’s favor. Even still every year, people from sea to shining sea are picking brackets, gambling and shit talking their friends.
So, what makes this activity gambling? And what does it say that one of the biggest events on the sports calendar is technically illegal?
The cold, hard odds
It’s no secret that picking a perfect NCAA March Madness bracket is almost impossible, but just how hard is it? What are the actual odds and statistics? The commonly accepted odds of a perfect bracket is approximately one in 9.1 quintillion. Most people hear that number and think it so astronomically huge that they don’t truly know how difficult a process must be to yield these odds.
First, one has to pick the first round winners, i.e. pick thirty two games perfectly. Once they pick all those teams perfectly, they must then choose the correct winner of each sequential game again (that is, if the teams you picked are correct).
These crazy odds are a result of the fact that it’s an exponential game, meaning that it gets harder and harder as the tournament progresses. Also important is the fact that bracket services don’t deal with picking a perfect bracket or not. They obviously deal with wins and losses, but more and more services deal with what percentile you fall into nationally with respect to the teams you picked.
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To put these odds into layman’s terms, you are more likely to become the president and have won at least one Academy Award in your lifetime before picking out a perfect NCAA bracket.
The money involved
Obviously with any big sporting event or events, there exists copious amounts of betting and gambling. Some people might take offense to that “g-word” given the tournament’s ranking system and belief that general knowledge of the sport and teams would seemingly provide an advantage. But there exists a dynamic in sports and specifically college basketball that turns conventional wisdom upside down.
Think of it this way: you go to the casino, walk to a roulette wheel and put some money on black (see “rules and gameplay of Roulette”). The odds are simple; there are always the same amount of black spaces on the wheel and the same amount of red spaces with one green space. These don’t change. Your odds of winning at any given bet are generally the same.
The difference in sports is that every team has their good days and bad days. Upsets, buzzer beaters and injuries are just a few of the many reasons that the odds of these games are dynamic. Simply picking the highest seed in every sequential game might seem like the best thing to do, but there are upsets every year that nobody sees coming.
This is why betting on these types of games more like gambling due to these instances of blind luck. After all, you could be a data scientist who follows sports and basketball with a passion, but all it takes is one shot, one season-ending injury or one underdog having the game of their life to throw off the bracketology.
Our take
The NCAA March Madness tournament is one that is full of shining moments, upsets, broken spirits and underdogs taking the tournament by storm, yet people gamble and rely on conventional wisdom each year.
It’s always fun to fill out brackets and compete with friends, but realize that putting money on something so dynamic is more about paying for entertainment than it is a profitable venture. Remember this when that scrawny, five-foot-eight point guard from Virginia Commonwealth University drains a three-pointer to win the upset of the tourney.
The irony of all of this is that one of America’s annual collective cultural moments is technically illegal under current laws. If this doesn’t show you how silly America’s gambling prohibition is, I don’t know what will.
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Header image: Sean Gardner / Getty
