Following Selection Sunday on March 16, the tournament was set, and college basketball fans began filling out their “perfect” brackets to compete against friends and family. Now, with March almost over and the college basketball tournament well underway, fans watch to see if they made all the correct picks in their bracket.
Many Christ Church students are competing against their friends and family on printed brackets, online at espn.com, or in the Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge. The Billion Dollar Challenge is funded by Warren Buffett who would have given $1,000,000,000 to anyone that could have filled out a perfect bracket at quickenloansbracket.com. Unfortunately through a little over a week of games, 29 to be exact, no perfect brackets remain for the Billion Dollar Challenge. Although, creating a perfect bracket isn’t as easy as you think, the odds are about 1 in 128 billion. You are more likely to get struck by lightning or win the Mega Millions Lottery. No matter how badly you believe you picked the perfect bracket, the chances are very slim.
Radford Swent, a Christ Church freshman, is competing online at espn.com against some of his fellow classmates. Swent says, “The key to a good bracket is to pick the right upsets. For example, my picks of Tennessee and UCONN in the Sweet Sixteen have proved to be great picks while picking New Mexico to beat Kansas was awful.”
Since a perfect bracket does not remain, no one has a chance at the billion dollars but remember, there is always next year.