The packed bar had 20 TVs, but all eyes were glued to one. And despite the obnoxious girl at the table next to us, everyone was thinking the same thing – Lehigh was about to knock Duke down a peg. God bless the NCAA tournament. It didn’t matter that everyone in that bar hadn’t had Lehigh when they filled in their brackets, they would have rather seen that first round upset than have their brackets flawless despite their $10, pizza or in my case, ice cream bet being on the line.
I had a lot to lose, since every year since I was 16, I would take Duke all the way to the championship, and this year was no exception. And with a final score of 75-70, the Lehigh Mountain Hawksa – a no. 15 seed – took down the Duke Blue Devils.
Why do we do this? The anger. The frustration of losing to the guy who doesn’t know a thing about basketball or the woman who thought a 16 was better than a one seed.
Well, math professor at DePaul University Jeff Bergen figured out what almost everyone already knows. You’ll never have a perfect bracket. There are over nine quintillion ways to fill out the bracket … and only one is right. According to Bergen, even if you know something about college basketball your odds only improve a little better than one in 128 billion.
With over 4,000 views on the video of Bergen figuring out the bracket odds, he is DePaul’s biggest YouTube star, but this isn’t the first time he’s done the math.
“I’ve been a college basketball fan my whole life and interested in mathematics my whole life, so it seems very compatible,” said Bergen. And that’s how news organizations started coming to him for the odds of filling out a perfect bracket. After losing a lot of pizza bets to his family for poorly filled out brackets, Bergen took a bracket break.
“I actually haven’t filled out a bracket in years,” he said. But since he knew he would be appearing on channel nine and appearing on other news outlets he decided to pick at least a winner this year. “I made the prediction this year of Ohio State for the purely scientific reason of a family connection.” This year, despite the early and rare upsets of two 2’s falling in the first round and NC State’s impressive run as an 11 on top of Ohio University’s run as a 13 seed, perfect brackets were just as hard to come by as ever, according to Bergen.
“By the time the first round was over there were no perfect brackets and that pretty much happens every year,” he said. “I do like to check every year to see how long it is before there are no perfect brackets and it’s always the first round every year.”
He went on to say that even though the first day of the tournament had been relatively uneventful in terms of upsets, there were no perfect brackets on ESPN even before Duke lost. So it turns out everyone’s brackets came crashing down before mine.
“Which again illustrates how hard it is,” he said.
So why do people still fill out these brackets?
“One, it doesn’t really matter if you get a perfect bracket,” said Bergen. “What really matters is that you get the best bracket in your office. Because there are so many possibilities almost none of the brackets end up to be the same.”
The second reason for Bergen is the level playing field of the odds being so low at perfection.
“Because there are so many upsets, the person who doesn’t know college basketball has as good a chance of winning as the person who does know about college basketball,” he said.
It puts everyone on an equal footing which makes it a lot of fun. Why else do we do it? We love the friendly competition with co-workers and family. We love the Cinderella story. And most of all we love the underdog. So kudos, Lehigh. Thanks for busting my bracket.
And hey, Dad, despite not having my champion in the running your bracket was still worse than mine. You owe me an ice cream cone.