Deep dish, deep odds

Papa John's is running a promotion with The Sporting News whereby if anyone can correctly predict the outcome of all 63 NCAA Tournament basketball games, everyone who fills out a bracket on the site will get to evenly split 1,000,000 pizzas. As a press release notes:

As the official sponsor of SportingNews.com’s bracket page, Papa John’s is offering 1,000,000 large Papa’s Perfect Pan pepperoni pizzas for a “perfect bracket,” a prize that will be divvied up evenly among all eligible fans who enter their bracket picks at the SportingNews.com.

Cool, eh?

Well this got me to thinking: just how hard can it be to fill out the perfect bracket? We all give it our best shot every year – with a few dollars attached in a good number of American offices.

And, oftentimes, it's the person who seems to know the least about college ball that wins.

So, just what are the odds?

There are 63 games that one would have to select properly to complete the “perfect” bracket. Mathematically, the odds of this – if one were to randomly select each game with no prior knowledge of the sport – are a mere 1:9,223,372,040,000,000,000.

Okay, that seems like quite the longshot. So let's suppose that there aren't any real upsets and the top four teams in each bracket advance to the Sweet 16. If each game is randomized from there, the odds of picking a perfect bracket are trimmed down to a meager 1:32,768.

Knock things down to the Elite Eight – at which point, there needs to have either been an upset of sorts or the person doing the picking will be forced to select between some very evenly matched #1 and #2 squads. From here, the odds are 1:128.

So enjoy March Madness and have fun with your brackets. But don't count on Papa John's offering you any free dough – there is a much better chance of seeing a #16 team win it all.