The Billion-Dollar Brackets of March Madness

One in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. That’s over nine quintillion, for those of you who gave up after the fourth comma. Those are the odds of a coin-flipping novice filling out a perfect March Madness bracket, calculated by realizing the two possible outcomes for every game in every round, expressed 2^63. The astronomical odds dwarf the likelihood of death by a vending machine falling on you (roughly 1 in 127 million) or winning Powerball (1 in 292 million). In fact, with the CDC stating the odds of being hit by lightning are 1 in 500,000 in any given year, you’re more likely to be zapped 18 trillion times before predicting the outcome of every match in the famed college basketball tournament, which explains why nobody ever has since the tradition was born back in 1977 within the walls of a Staten Island bar called Jody’s Club Forest. The near impossibility of producing a perfect bracket accurately reflects the volatility of an event known for its wild gameplay and massive upsets, hence its name (which is why the NCAA itself emphasizes that even a college hoops aficionado has only a 1 in 120 billion shot at perfection). But the true “madness” is the fact that in a billion-dollar-plus production, the workers still aren’t paid a cent.

The NCAA generates roughly $870 million every March from television and marketing rights alone, thanks to a gargantuan multi-billion-dollar deal with CBS and Turner that extends until 2032. In 2019, Yahoo ranked that agreement as the third-most lucrative sports deal ever, pulling in ahead of Premier League soccer and Major League Baseball. What’s more, ticket sales net college basketball in the neighborhood of $180 million, bringing earnings up over $1 billion per year. And that’s just the money that the NCAA sees. With thousands flocking every year to take in the madness, the 14 host cities stand to see hundreds of millions in revenue when the tournament rolls around their way. For instance, Minneapolis reported an uptick of $143 million in tourist dollars in 2019 after hosting the Final Four.

Then there’s this little thing called sports betting, which has become infinitely more accessible after the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, in 2018, allowing states to legalize gambling. The results have been staggering, as dollars come pouring in on a monthly basis at the state level. New York, for example, became the new No. 1 legalized sports betting market in the United States after bringing in $1.6 billion in just four weeks of mobile betting on sports of all kinds this past January.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2022/03/08/the-billion-dollar-brackets-of-march-madness/