There may be three games left to go, and the month of March has already come and gone, but without a doubt, I was not a winner of March Madness.
Of course, I can take solace in the fact that I have lost along with every single other person who filled out a bracket. Rarely do perfect brackets last beyond the first day of games, and this year was no different. And for part of the first round, my bracket was about as accurate as a coin flip. A few rounds later, and I can safely say that the $10 I spent on my pool is no more, and such is the punishment for my illegal gambling escapades — and also for my poor bracket choices.
Since I refuse to blame my own knowledge for my incorrect selections — because why would I ever do that — I’m choosing to blame math instead. Picking blindly from a field of 64 teams, there is roughly a one in 9.2 quintillion chance of picking a perfect bracket. That’s a really big number, and I’m forced to round it because the AP Stylebook probably doesn’t cover what to do with numbers that take three lines of text to print. If you really wanted to win a billion dollars, you’re better off trying to do it by playing the Mega Millions lottery over and over instead of winning Warren Buffett’s perfect bracket challenge. Even according to the best of C-3P0’s calculations, picking a perfect bracket is two and a half quadrillion times more unlikely than navigating the asteroid field.
I know, I know, never tell you the odds. After all, a little bit of basketball knowledge is better than blind picking, and there is the wealth of an entire Internet of statistics and research in your arsenal. FiveThirtyEight calculated its bracket predictions this year using every statistical source at their disposal, so surely they have a chance at getting it right. And well, they do: by their estimations, they have a one in 1,610,543,269 chance.
So, you’re telling me there’s a chance? Probably not. That friend in your pool who picked teams by the ferocity of their mascots and was sitting in a cool third place after the first round is proof enough — yes, University of Alabama at Birmingham Blazers, I’m looking at your first-round upset and your dragon mascot. Meanwhile, the hour I spent looking up team research, log5 analyses and statistics galore might as well have been spent watching Jimmy Fallon lip-sync videos.
Yet it’s the same cruel element of chance that makes March Madness, well, mad. It’s looking up in the lecture hall and seeing all the computers throughout the auditorium watching Georgia Tech come back and upset Baylor. Excitement brought from the same mechanics as picking a card from a deck or rolling the dice, realized in the extravagance of a sporting event. The numbers and formulas become irrelevant, replaced with the reality they tried to describe.
Chance is the drive of the thrill of everyday life. We’re all Charlie Bucket, asking, “I’ve got the same chance as anybody else, haven’t I?” Chance itself is the Golden Ticket, the device that takes the ordinary and gives it a chance to be extraordinary. It takes the monotony and makes it into something undeterminable. Sometimes the only certainty is the existence of inevitable uncertainty, the anticipation of not knowing what lies behind the chocolate bar wrapper.
This principle of uncertainty governs everything around us, to the point where we conclude that Schrodinger’s cat is both alive and dead, and that’s somehow OK. You can continue spinning the wheel, around and around, knowing that in the moment you’re spinning it you are in control, and the moment you let go you relinquish it all. So you roll the dice, pick up whatever card is on top of the deck, pass Go, collect your $200 and go at it again.
Because all you really need is a chance.
David Harris can be reached at daharr@umich.edu.