Hopefully, yesterdays post about NCAA basketball has gotten you riled up and ready to go, but here are a few things you might not have known about March Madness found on the AskMen.com site.
1- March Madness bracket odds are over 9-quintillion-to-1
The first thing you didn't know about March Madness is that the odds of you picking a perfect March Madness bracket are not just horrible, they're almost impossibly bad. You have a substantially better shot at winning the Powerball than you do at picking a perfect bracket.There are a total of 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possible bracket outcomes, making the odds of a perfect bracket over 9.2-quintillion-to-1. In fact, the odds are so bad that, according to RJ Bell at Pregame.com, if every individual alive in the world completed a bracket, the odds are a billion-to-one against any of them being perfect.
2- March Madness winners keep the winning court
We're all familiar with the shot of the winning coach snipping the net from the rim; it's a symbolic moment that caps off March Madness, and up until 1986 it was really all the NCAA allowed the team to keep.As of 1986, however, teams have been given the actual hardwood court they won the championship on, and they are free to do with it as they see fit. Some schools have repainted it and used the hardwood for their own home court, while others have sold the court in pieces, and others have done nothing at all with it.
3- $2.5 billion is illegally bet on March Madness each year
Another thing you didn't know about March Madness is how much is bet illegally on the tournament each year. The FBI puts this figure at around $2.5 billion, with just a small percentage of this amount taking place in the betting capital of the world, Las Vegas.One in 10 Americans play March Madness brackets, whether online, among an office pool or just a group of friends and associates, and fans eagerly anticipate those brackets. Nationwide, it's a massive annual betting event, among the biggest in the nation.
4- The NCAA does not profit from March Madness
March Madness is an event worth billions of dollars in revenue thanks to a hefty television broadcast contract, but in lieu of its own revenue distribution plan, the NCAA does not keep the profits; rather, they are distributed among the schools and conferences playing in the tournament.A fraction (one-sixth) of the revenue goes toward participating schools based on how many Division I sports teams they field; another fraction (one-third) is doled out to participating schools based on the number of scholarships they hand out; and, finally, a full one-half of the entire revenue generated goes to the conferences based on their performance in the previous six NCAA men's basketball tournaments.
5- No. 16 seeds are a March Madness lost cause
Finally, the last thing you didn't know about March Madness is the utter futility of the No. 16 seed. Since the NCAA expanded the tournament to 64 teams, No. 16 seeds have a despairing record of 0-for-96. Assuming this trend continues in 2009, those seeds will be an even 0-for-100. To make matters worse, far more often than not these seeds lose by more than 10 points.The closest a No. 16 seed has ever come to beating a No. 1 seed occurred in 1990, when unknown Kentucky-based Murray State took top-seeded Michigan State into overtime, ultimately losing 75-71.
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