5 Things You Didn’t Know: March Madness

The NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, better known as March Madness, dates back to 1939, but the current tournament bears little resemblance to previous installments. March Madness has undergone numerous changes since then, and each year the excitement and anticipation seems to grow leading up to the Final Four (otherwise known as the semifinals) and the crowning of the national champion.

The NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, better known as March Madness, dates back to 1939, but the current tournament bears little resemblance to previous installments. March Madness has undergone numerous changes since then, and each year the excitement and anticipation seems to grow leading up to the Final Four (otherwise known as the semifinals) and the crowning of the national champion. Perennial favorites include UCLA (with 11 championships, the most of any school), Kentucky (with 7), Indiana (with 5), North Carolina (with 4), and Duke and Kansas (with 3 each). In short, March Madness is a fitting name for this tournament, as it is one of the most watched and wagered-on annual sporting events in the United States.

In honor of the current tourney, we present 5 things you didn’t know about March Madness.

The first thing you didn’t know about March Madness is that the odds of you picking a perfect March Madness bracket are not just horrible, they’re almost impossibly bad. You have a substantially better shot at winning the Powerball than you do at picking a perfect bracket.

There are a total of 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possible bracket outcomes, making the odds of a perfect bracket over 9.2-quintillion-to-1. In fact, the odds are so bad that, according to RJ Bell at Pregame.com, if every individual alive in the world completed a bracket, the odds are a billion-to-one against any of them being perfect.

We’re all familiar with the shot of the winning coach snipping the net from the rim; it’s a symbolic moment that caps off March Madness, and up until 1986 it was really all the NCAA allowed the team to keep. 

As of 1986, however, teams have been given the actual hardwood court they won the championship on, and they are free to do with it as they see fit. Some schools have repainted it and used the hardwood for their own home court, while others have sold the court in pieces, and others have done nothing at all with it.

Another thing you didn’t know about March Madness is how much is bet illegally on the tournament each year. The FBI puts this figure at around $2.5 billion, with just a small percentage of this amount taking place in the betting capital of the world, Las Vegas.

One in 10 Americans play March Madness brackets, whether online, among an office pool or just a group of friends and associates, and fans eagerly anticipate those brackets. Nationwide, it’s a massive annual betting event, among the biggest in the nation.