2018’s Craziest NCAA Bracket Buster Story

The Madness arrived Thursday afternoon with the tip-off of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament featuring 16 games on each of the first two days of the 64-team tournament. 

As well all know, the odds of making a perfect bracket are RIDICULOUS!

Neil Greenberg of the WashingtonPost recently explained:

...There are more than nine quintillion different bracket combinations — that’s a nine, followed by 18 zeros. If you filled out that many paper brackets by hand and stacked on top of each other it would reach Pluto … and back … 60 times. You could trim that down to 128 billion-to-1 odds by factoring in ratings and seedings...

In our Townsquare Media company-wide office pool, Dave Coombs of our sister station Lite987 nearly had a perfect Day 1. He hit 15-of-16 games - one of eight TSM employees to correctly pick 15-of-16 on the opening day (Nice Job! to all 8 of you BTW!!!)

Normally you'd think Dave's hot-start would put him among the favorites to win it all, but his lone loss came in No.13 Buffalo's upset win over Arizona - and he picked the fourth-seeded Wildcats to win the whole thing!

So, he's got no chance to win, right?

Umm, not so fast. This pool awards a point for each correct pick, with no weighting of wins by round (as many tournament typically do).

Despite having lost his championship team right out of the gate, he still has a chance to win it.

Good Luck Dave!

Elsewhere:

In case you were wondering, ESPN SportsCenter tweeted Friday morning that of more than 17 million entries, there were just 6,306 perfect brackets remaining in their NCAA Tournament Challenge.There were also 18 brackets that were win-less on Day 1.

If these were legitimate brackets (in other words, they weren't just left blank), I say these folks deserve an award for futility. It is just as hard to get them all wrong as it is to get them all right.