March Madness has finally arrived, the annual three-week quest for glory in college basketball.
As dozens of teams aim for a slam dunk on the court, millions of spectators are also going through a similar rite of passage: filling out an NCAA tournament bracket.
The challenge is not just for hardcore fans trying to show off their knowledge by picking the winners of 63 games, or for those looking to brag around the water cooler. Even novices get involved, sometimes deciding which team to back based on the mascot that catches their eye, a team’s colors or where they went to school.
This year, as the main portion of the tournament begins Thursday, you have a chance to win really big, way beyond your office pool. That’s because the myriad of bracket challenges includes one out-of-this-world prize — an actual trip to Mars.
On Sunday, the X Bracket Challenge was announced at the same time the NCAA field was revealed. Participants can make their picks until 11 a.m. Thursday (EDT) to win a trip to the Red Planet on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle.
The only catch? You have to fill out a perfect bracket, which, by the way, no one has ever done.
According to the NCAA, you have 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 odds to pick every game correctly by guessing, and 1 in 120.2 billion odds if you “know a little something about basketball.”
So, maybe Elon Musk won’t be sweating too much.
The official NCAA competition is the Capital One March Madness Bracket Challenge, where you can select up to 10 brackets and pick the winner of each game in the men’s and women’s tournaments. Having the most points — by picking the most correct games and having your teams advance the furthest in the Big Dance — can earn you a trip to next year’s men’s national semifinals and finals.
For those who need a little help making their selections, they could get an assist from Georgia Tech. Three engineering professors developed a computer ranking system designed to predict tournament winners that went live in 2004.
One of those professors, Joel Sokol, said their system (Logistic Regression Markov Chain) isn’t predicting many upsets this year, theorizing that the four No. 1 seeds — Auburn, Duke, Florida and Houston — are most likely to make it to the Final Four.
“There will still be upsets because of the inherent randomness/unpredictability in college basketball, but there are only a few games in the bracket where LRMC believes that the worse-seeded team is better than the better-seeded team, and even in those cases, it’s pretty close,” Sokol told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday.
Sokol said their method has picked the winner of more than 74% of tournament games since it was developed — not a bad percentage considering one-fourth of all games are won by the lower seed.
“I think that’s really what makes the tournament exciting for everyone — without upsets, we’d see a lot of good basketball but it wouldn’t really be exciting until the last three rounds or so," Sokol said.
Picking that elusive perfect bracket can also net you $1 million in the USA Today contest, or you can take home $5,000 by projecting the champions in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge for both the men’s and women’s tournaments. Those who submit the best bracket in the Yahoo Bracket Mayhem contest will be eligible to win $25,000.
And if you’re an employee of Berkshire Hathaway, you can win $1 million by picking the winners of at least 30 of the 32 first-round games Thursday and Friday. The company’s prize had been $1 billion for submitting a perfect bracket, but chairperson and billionaire Warren Buffett changed the rules this year to give his workers a better shot at their one shining moment.
“I’m getting older,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”
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