With the NCAA tournament starting on this wild Thursday afternoon, why not throw out a few statistics about March Madness that might make you say, “Really?†But you’ll probably be paying too much attention to the games to even care.
-So what exactly are the odds of picking a perfect bracket? Well, you would have to fill out 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 different entries to insure that one was perfect. Although, if you figure in the for sure bets like Nos. 1 and 2 seeds winning in the first round, then the number of different brackets you’d have to fill out drops to a still unreasonable 16,777,216.
-How much does success in the NCAA tournament correlate to success in the NBA? Well let’s put it this way: Currently in the NBA there are only two players that have won both a NCAA title and an NBA title. One is Rip Hamilton, who actually helped his teams a lot more than the other guy, Nazr Mohammed. In basketball history, only 34 players have double-dipped, so this feat isn’t as common as you might have thought.
-For everyone that is picking Baylor to make a long run in the tourney, it might want to be remembered that the school hasn’t won a tourney game in over 40 years. Can they buck that trend? I would hope so facing Sam Houston State as a three seed.
-President Barack Obama has gone with some chalk again, picking two number ones to reach the final. His Kansas-Kentucky pick is not really news to anybody; it’s probably the most common final out there in pools.
So, as the day goes on, you will see some updates here, liveblog style, since, like all of you, I’ll be planted on my couch watching the madness go down.