Care to see the complete quantity written out? It’s 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. And in the event you need assistance with the commas, a quintillion equals a billion billion.
However basketball video games have a tendency to not be true tossups. Accounting, then, for the truth that some matchups are simpler to foretell, the chance drops to 1 within the tens or a whole bunch of billions, relying on who’s calculating them — nonetheless far, far much less possible than hitting the Powerball jackpot, as an example.
“Perfection’s mainly unimaginable,” mentioned Richard Cleary, a mathematician at Babson Faculty. “It’s out of the query.”
In 2019, Gregg Nigl, a neuropsychologist from Columbus, Ohio, went on what’s accepted to be the longest verifiably excellent run in N.C.A.A. males’s match historical past. Submitting a bracket he had stuffed out in a couple of minutes — and below the affect of chilly medication — Nigl predicted the primary 49 video games appropriately earlier than seeing his streak snapped.
By then, he was a star within the sports activities world. Whereas his streak was intact, Buick paid for him and his son to fly to California to observe late-round video games. He discovered the entire expertise surreal. Whereas strolling by the Newark airport to catch a connecting flight, he noticed his face beaming out from a row of televisions in a sports activities bar.
Nigl considers himself a fortunate individual. In 2001 on a seashore in Hawaii, he noticed Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, his favourite band. He shook Vedder’s hand and even bought an image with him. His head, again then, was spinning: What could possibly be luckier than this?
Eighteen years later got here his match run. Folks pester Nigl at present for his yearly picks, believing he may need some particular perception. They ask him what chilly medication he took when he mapped out his magical bracket. (It was Tylenol, “Cool Burst” flavored, for the report.)