March Madness gives you 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 opportunities to feel like an idiot

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Nothing can make you feel like an idiot quite like filling out an NCAA tournament bracket.

Anybody who thinks they can accurately predict all 64 games of the March Madness (don’t forget the play-in) is as deluded as the Mattel executive who thought Barbie could be a surgeon. President Barack Obama, under the tutelage of ESPN’s Andy Katz, will miss some. So will you.

There are 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible ways of filling out a 65-team bracket. That’s 18.4 quintillion ... a number so large that even insurance companies weren’t audacious enough to use it in their bailout requests.

No wonder there’s a website offering $100 million to anybody who fills out a ‘perfect bracket.’ That doesn’t even cover executive bonuses at AIG -- though you’d be more deserving if you correctly predicted the entire tournament.

Of course, most major bracket organizers -- including CBS, ESPN, Yahoo and ye ol’ L.A. Times -- want to make it easy on you. Since the play-in between Morehead State and Alabama State is out of the way (the Eagles earned the honor of losing to Louisville), there are merely 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possibilities left. (I spent some time geeking out on this one. You can check the math here. Remember they don’t include the play-in game.)

Yahoo, incidentally, is offering a paltry $1 million for a perfect bracket. We aren’t giving away anything on latimes.com, but Sam Zell could have offered up the Chicago Cubs. Scary thought: Their odds of winning a World Series are way better than your odds of predicting just the first round.

Another reason people rarely include the play-in game? You need until Thursday to finish throwing all those darts at a board. The alternative is to stay up all night doing research. Let’s be honest -- you never watched all 65 teams. I doubt anybody saw every team play, no matter how authoritative those experts sound on TV. They’ve never filled out a perfect bracket, either.

There’s actually no known incident of a perfect bracket. You can search for it, but you won’t find it. If somebody’s pulled it off, they live beyond the reach of the mighty Google. And really, what are the odds that somebody without internet could know anything about VCU? Heck, several players from UCLA -- their first-round opponent -- didn’t even know what those initials stood for after the pairings were announced on Sunday. (It’s Virginia Commonwealth University, by the way.)

For more evidence of how hard it is to make good predictions, look no further than this blog. Four LA Times sports writers made their guesses for the Pac-10 tournament ... a relatively ‘easy’ bracket with only 10 teams who had already played each other twice. Even though the writers had followed the Pac-10 all year, nobody guessed USC would make the final round -- much less win it all.

What do we know? This year in college hoops was topsy-turvey, with the No. 1 team changing almost weekly during the heart of the season. A number of those top ranked teams were playing each other, of course. Now, most ‘experts’ think there are eight really strong teams who, collectively, were correctly placed in the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds. There’s parity among them, but not with the also-rans who they’ll face this week. I’m picking all of them to advance through at least the Sweet Sixteen -- and I’m probably wrong. But it’s a start.

Just 140 trillion possible outcomes left.

-- Adam Rose

Photo: Screen grab from the latimes.com NCAA tournament bracket.