Gary Brown: Let's try to beat the basketball odds

By the time you read this, my college basketball tournament bracket will have been busted.

It's always busted by the end of the first weekend of the tournament. Truth be told, almost all brackets probably are. So, at least I'm not alone.

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I read a post about "the absurd odds of a perfect March Madness bracket" at ncaa.com the other day, and it said there are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 – "That's 9.2 quintillion" – ways to pick a March Madness bracket. That's a lot of ways to lose.

"No one has gotten a verifiably perfect bracket in the history of the NCAA tournament. ..." the posting said. "Yes, it is technically possible, and even absurdly overwhelming odds don’t mean it couldn’t theoretically happen this year."

"But we’re pretty confident in saying that it won’t."

The posting went on to explain the chances of perfection, as gauged by people who have enough time on their hands to figure these things out, varies over a wide yet still depressing range. It claimed that the odds of picking every game ranged from 1 in that 9.2 quintillion we were talking about "(if you just guess or flip a coin)" down to about 1 in 120.2 billion "(if you know a little something about basketball)."

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That's supposed to be an improvement, but somehow, it doesn't make me feel any more confident about my chances. I haven't been watching as much basketball this season as usual, so I feel sort of stupid about the top teams. And I'm a guy, so I wear pants, and I have easy access to flippable pocket change.

Ways not to choose

These really bad odds against perfection pertain to both the men's and women's tournaments, of course. Gender doesn't matter in basketball. All things being equal your bracket will get busted, as will your buddy's bracket, and your brother's, and your sister's, as well.

Oh, you'll have a little better chance of picking more wins than losses if you use the different college basketball polls and tournament seedings as measuring tools. Certainly, those are better means of determining your winners than relying on innate mascot strength, or the stylishness of uniform color, or even – as Sports Illustrated suggested in a tongue-in-cheek article a few years ago – by choosing schools "based on which one is rated higher according to U.S. News and World Report's academic rankings."

Still, no matter what, by this point in the tournament – only a few scant days into March Madness – I have a better chance betting on the liklihood that my bracket, your bracket, or anybody else's bracket will be busted than wagering I'll have picked any of the teams who travel the entire distance down the road to the "Final Four."

I recall that on one of my best years I picked only two of those "Final Four" teams in the men's tournament. Neither of them made it to the championship game.

Already a done deal

Obviously, it's too late now to improve your bracket performance. Your choices have been made.

Many of your teams already are gone. Of the ones you picked that won, some of the teams you thought would go the farthest have appeared by their play to be more in jeopardy than you might have imagined. And, there turned out to be a good reason why the underdogs you picked to slip past their first opponents were bad seeds.

Your bracket is busted, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Or, parhaps you can, unofficially. Maybe you could make out a new bracket.

Granted, it won't win you any money became you can't re-enter a March Madness pool after much of the first round has been played.

But, if you just leave a new and improved bracket – one filled out with winners all over the place – and leave it in plain view on a coffee table, people who are watching the games with you today might just think you are generally intelligent about the subtleties of sports and specifically brilliant when it comes to basketball.

This technique for changing your fate as a prognosticator works especially well if you do it towards the end of the "Sweet Sixteen" or "Elite Eight" rounds, when you will have appeared to pick correctly games that are played deep into the tournament. Friends might even say "Wow."

Sure it's cheating. It's somewhat deceptive. All right, it's downright lying and doesn't measure up to the standards of good sportsmanship that are cherished in sports.

But, so what? They do call it March Madness. Sometimes a player will help up an opponent he knocked down with a hard move to the basket, and other times a player will just jam the ball in the basket and step over the opponent as he heads down to the other end of the court.

If nobody calls a foul, play on. And play that game for style points.

Just leave a few of the losers in your newest bracket. Nobody will believe you're bright enough to beat 1 in 9.2 quintillion odds.

Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.

This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Showcase your March Madness skills to beat the odds