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Introducing the Perfect Bracket Project

jweimer25

Ever since I started filling out NCAA tournament brackets (the halcyon years of the mid-90’s), I’ve dreamt about filling out a perfect bracket. Predicting the whole thing right. Every game.

 

I’m certainly not the only one who has entertained this fantasy. Only now, in the maturity of my mid-40’s, I’ve become a bit more pragmatic. For one, I’ve learned the odds of achieving such a feat:

 

1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.

 

To represent that ridiculous number a different way, here’s how you’d write it out:

 

Nine quintillion, two-hundred and twenty-three quadrillion, three-hundred and seventy-two trillion, thirty-six billion, eight-hundred and fifty-four million, seven-hundred and seventy-five thousand, eight-hundred and eight.

 

A book with that many pages would be wider than the diameter of our entire solar system, and picking a perfect bracket would be like turning to the exact right page of said book on the first try. That’s the ultimate lottery ticket, and those odds would tell us that it’ll never happen, no matter how long the NCAA basketball tournament remains in existence.

 

Yet, instead of giving up the dream, I maintain that it is indeed possible, and that it’ll happen in my lifetime. Not by me, unless I get incredibly lucky, but by someone. And that, in short, is the PERFECT BRACKET PROJECT: to make the impossible a reality by obsessively studying the brackets of the past in order to deduce the brackets of the future.


There have been 39 men's tournaments since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985, enough to tease out data and trends that will allow us to reduce these insurmountable odds considerably. And, lucky for us, the very structure of the tournament creates some natural reduction. As this article on NCAA.com indicates, our 1 in 9.2 quintillion number assumes that each game is a 50/50 proposition, which is, of course, not true. Though we've seen two 1 seeds fall to 16's in the last decade, these games, and many others on the bracket, aren't simple coin flips.


This reality, plus many years of data on actual predicted brackets archived on the wonderful digital biosphere known as ‘the Internet,’ as well as the fact that many bracket-fillers have far more than a passing knowledge of college basketball and the trends of the NCAA Tournament (by now, nearly everyone knows that a 12 will beat a 5, right?), leads the author of our previously cited article to conclude that the real odds are about 1 in 120.2 billion. This is still massive, of course. Instead of a picking a page from a book wider than the solar system, hitting 1 in 120 billion odds is like picking a page from a book as wide as the Earth.


We have to, and can, do much better. We'll do that by painstakingly studying the history of those aforementioned 39 tournaments, introducing us to concepts like Chalk Deviance, Madness Scores, and Seedigami. And along the way, we might as well point out what years gave us the most extreme, most boring, and most average tournaments, and the single maddest thing that has happened in the history of March Madness (hint: it doesn't involve UMBC or Fairleigh Dickinson).


By the end of our exploration, I'll give you my Perfect Bracket Parameters: data-tested guidelines for filling out a bracket that just might maybe achieve perfection. Instead of a planet-width book, we'll have a nice, tidy Texas-width one. Then it's just a matter of finding enough people to pull pages (use the Parameters), and someday one of us will snatch the right one.


Join me between now and Selection Sunday as we break down the brackets of the past, beginning with that most celebrated of all March traditions: the Upset. (post coming soon)



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