March 15, 2007

The odds of picking an entire NCAA Tournament bracket correctly, according to arca/ex, a fully electronic stock exchange, is 9,220 quadrillion to 1. One quadrillion is 1 followed by 15 zeros.

If every man, woman and child on Earth, from Tupelo to Timbuktu and everywhere in between, filled out 1 million NCAA Tournament brackets, the odds of getting all 64 correct is more than 1,000 to 1.

It makes winning Powerball seem reachable, a date with Scarlett Johansson believable and winning the Daytona 500 with a Toyota Prius a sure thing. Anyone who can successfully pick an entire bracket should get all three of the aforementioned, and then some.

Everyone from experts to nonsensical talking heads (read Dick Vitale) to Joe Sixpack have been feverishly concocting the perfect bracket. After today, how many will be perfect? Surely many, but it won’t last for long.

As the days move forward and the field of 64 tournament teams is slowly whittled, fewer and fewer perfect brackets will appear.

By the time the Final Four comes around, find someone with a perfect bracket and odds are they filled it out during that morning’s coffee break.

Today, and today only, yours truly will reveal his secret to the perfect bracket. By the time this is being read, games will be in full swing so there is no need to cheat off of me.

First step: Creating a system.

For each of the four regional brackets, I have decided (and soon will patent) the perfect system.

Let’s start with St. Louis.

We’ll go strictly by picking favorites in this region. Rarely do 1 and 2 seeds match up for a championship, but that is what will happen here. The lowest-seeded team to win will be Arizona over Purdue, but then Florida will wash away Arizona.

The top-seeded Gators will advance to the regional final where they will beat second-seeded Wisconsin.

In the San Jose region, we’ll go to a coin flip with heads being the top team in each matchup. Some of the fantastic upsets in this region will be Holy Cross over Southern Illinois and Illinois over Virginia Tech.

Pittsburgh beats Illinois in the regional final to reach the Final Four.

In the East Rutherford, N.J. Regional, it’s all about school enrollment numbers. Seeing as Michigan State (42,000 students) and Texas (51,000) are by far the two biggest schools, they will meet in the semifinals with Texas advancing to the Final Four.

And finally in San Antonio, it’s all about arena size, which does matter. Memphis edges Louisville by fewer than 300 seats to reach the regional final, where the Tigers will fall to Tennessee and its mammoth Thompson-Boling Arena, second only to Syracuse’s Carrier Dome as the largest on-campus arena in America.

In the Final Four, Texas’ burnt orange uniforms will trump Tennessee’s hunter orange unis. On the other side, always go with the blue and orange of Florida over the blue and gold of Pittsburgh.

A final matchup between Texas and Florida will be won by .. drum roll please … Texas, which has a larger population than Florida.

So please, don’t cheat. Watch and see how it’s done by a true professional equipped only with a shiny quarter, the Internet, a bracket and nothing better to do.