This is the massive amount of money NCAA basketball fans spend trying to land the elusive March Madness perfect bracket

College basketball fans are crazy for March Madness, and part of what makes it fun is filling out the bracket to try your hand at predicting who will win the matchups and eventually make the Final Four. If you have been trying for years to come up with the perfect bracket and failing miserably at it, you’re not the only one. In fact, you’re literally like everyone else who has engaged in this endeavor - a failure in this regard.

What are the odds for a perfect March Madness bracket?

No one has ever had a perfect bracket for March Madness. The odds are definitely not in anyone’s favor, because mathematically, the chances of someone coming up with a perfectly accurate bracket are one in 9.2 quintillion. As you’re no doubt aware, a quintillion is the number one followed by 18 zeros. As the boffins at NCAA worked out it’s 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 if you just guess or flip a coin, and a slightly better 1 in 120.2 billion, if you know a little something about basketball.

The odds are so small that In 2014, billionaire Warren Buffett was confident enough to offer to pay $1 billion to anyone who would be able to come up with a perfect March Madness bracket. No one succeeded, as expected, and though the fifth richest man in the world made the same offer in succeeding years, it was typically made available only to employees of Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway.

What is the best ever March Madness bracket? Meet Gregg Nigl

The person who has come closest to correctly predicting the winners of all the games (on record) is Gregg Nigl of Columbus, Ohio, who achieved the record-setting feat in 2019. He correctly picked the winners for the first 49 games, and this broke the previous streak of 39 that was set in 2017.

A neuropsychologist by profession became the first verified bracket ever to pick through to the Sweet 16 correctly. Despite the astronomical odds against bracket players, they continue to fill them out in the hopes of one day winning something (whether it’s bragging rights or actual money). There are approximately 70 million March Madness brackets filled out each year, according to the American Gaming Association.

The tournament’s unpredictability makes the bracket contest interesting and popular for a wider group of people. Even people who know nothing about college basketball could correctly guess a game’s outcome through sheer luck, making the process fun, or frustrating, for those who wish to participate.

How much do basketball fans spend on brackets?

It is projected that the pursuit of a perfect March Madness bracket will cost the United States $5.3 billion, despite the impossible odds of landing a perfect set of results.

Unsurprisingly, nobody has ever successfully predicted every game across March Madness. But new research from data experts at Action Network calculates that the huge cost in chasing the near impossible task works out at $136.36 per person attempting to beat the bracket.

With 39 million people expected to fill in at least one bracket, March Madness would rank as the second-most popular major league fantasy game – almost double the popularity of NBA Fantasy (19,000,000).

The calculation of the money spent on March Madness is based on the collective money wagered on the tournament, bracket pool entry fees and the cost of time lost to people working on their perfect bracket.

With $3.1 billion spent on tournament wagering during the NCAA competition, this is where the bulk of the money comes from.

Next are the pools that people buy into, at an average cost of $29 per entry. With an estimated 39,000,000 people attempting at least one bracket, this total works out at $1,131,000,000.

Finally, is the time lost to people perfecting their picks. It has been calculated that the 39m participants spend an average of 45 minutes deciding on their bracket.

That works out to over 29 million hours lost to picking March Madness brackets. Considering the average hourly wage of $37.17 in the United States, that works out to total earnings of over $1 billion.

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