Salandro wrote:
"Actually, probably not. There are 9,223,372,036,854,780,000 possible bracket combinations
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Wendell Gee:
A. That number is clearly not correct as it should be a power of 2. You rounded it off, if nothing else. I'm too lazy to check what 2^63 is.
B. If you think those are all "possible", you don't understand probability. For instance, no 1 seed has ever lost in the first round. So, divide by 2^4. Has a 2 seed? If so, not more than once or twice, so divide by 2^4 again. You're already down to 1/256 as many combinations."
I think 2^63 would be used if there were 63 independent games (64 actually if you count the ever-important play-in game). Given that that is not the structure of the tournament, it's different calculation. I, too, am too lazy to go through a statistics book to figure out how to calculate that, but ESPN mentioned a number of similar magnitude on Sportscenter in terms of possible combinations, right before the tournament started.
Also, true, a 16 vs 1 upset hasn't happened in the men's tournament, but it is still possible. It's not quite the 1976 Hoosiers vs a local 4th grade team. The bottom line is odds of a perfect bracket are extremely low and it's not possible to make every possible bracket in time without a computer program.