Odds of picking a perfect bracket

(Ducking, he says):

You know what? It's certainly not an accurate representation of reality; I don't know if you could do such a thing, since reality changes between a 1 vs. a 16 and a 7 vs. an 11. Somebody would probably have to go through the entire history of the 64-team tournament, find the percentages of winners and losers between every possible seed pairing and then go from there.

But this thing is still kind of fun anyway.

I don't think it's serious enough to get too bent out of shape over it. It's a cool display idea.

 

Yeah. I'd rather have that number than the explanation on some web contest offering $1 million if you picked them all right -- PLUS THE EXACT SCORE OF THE FINAL GAME!

It said that odds depending on your skill in selecting winners.

Gee. Thanks.

 

A bunch of literalists. I thought the page was a good effort.
Captured my attention, and these days, that's our goal. Eyeballs. We need eyeballs.

 

Agree with you and SF Express. It was a creative idea. I don't think most readers stopped and tried calculate the odds of dating a supermodel or critiqued whether the bracket odds were correct, but they probably did think it looked pretty good and then, if they were interested in the topic, read the stories about filling out your bracket.

 

This tournament it was extremely feasible to pick a perfect bracket. Last year, not so much.

 

Well, I don't know what to say except to recite three words that were pasted onto my desk the first time I sat down for my first journalism course:

Accuracy. Accuracy. Accuracy.

"Creative idea" is only part of the equation.

It would be like doing a cartoon of Babe Ruth facing Roger Clemens . . . with Ruth hitting right-handed.

Or to put it another way . . .

Frank Deford would come up with the right number.

Bill Simmons would come up with the number the Seattle paper used.

There's a right way, and a lazy way.

On the other board we're up to 12 pages (and counting) of people bashing Jemele Hill for not doing a little research. Hmmmmmm . . .

They don't stop and calculate when we say the Dow dropped 3.2 percent or housing prices are up 26.8 percent, either. But that doesn't mean we just estimate and throw out a figure for the hell of it.

 

Dr. Math talked about this six years ago:

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/56223.html

 

Yeah. I am swayed.

Even if you think a No. 1 vs. No. 16 is a gimmee, what about that near-gimme of a 2 vs. 15 or a 3 vs. 14. You lose one of those -- which happens -- and your bracket is kablooey.

Also, the art of picking the likely upsets is difficult, too.

 

This is like exactly neither of those examples, but I guess we'll just agree to disagree.

 

Actually, the "we're hear to help" line at the bottom of the page makes the number work perfectly.

Look at it this way: with no knowledge of college basketball, seeding or the tournament format, the odds of picking a perfect bracket are indisputably (provably, demonstrably) 9,223,372,036,854,775,807-to-1.

But every bit of information and expertise you add to the project -- such as knowing that Florida likely won't lose to a 16 seed, for example -- should reduce those odds. Presumably, reading the information in this section should help you do that. So yeah, I think the idea is pulled off pretty well.

 

Good points...