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How to fill out the perfect bracket

There are exactly 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 ways to fill out a bracket. Just trust me.

Now, I don’t know how to say that number out loud, but I know that the chances of picking a perfect March Madness bracket are far from favorable. So is a perfect bracket completely impossible?

This year, there were 11.57 million brackets entered into ESPN’s Tournament Challenge alone. After the first day, only .0024 percent of the brackets entered into ESPN were still perfect. It only took two and a half days into the 12-gameday tournament for all of them to get busted.

The one bracket that was perfect, from ESPN user Malaquias4394, fell after Arizona defeated Ohio State, Malaquias4394’s favorite team. His perfect bracket lasted 34 games, an improvement over last year’s perfect bracket that lasted 25 games out of 67 total.

Any sane person would give up hope and accept the fact that their bracket will never be perfect. But I’m just crazy, naive, and money-hungry enough to make an argument that it’s possible to have a perfect bracket. It could take forever, but in my eyes, at least six things need to happen.

1.) You need a year of dominant teams. The first scenario is simple. When there are more dominant teams, it’s easier to pick who will win each game. This year, Kentucky has been the dominant team and has a 49 percent chance to win it all. Most brackets have them taking the championship, and deservedly so. But last year, the 7-seed UConn defeated 8-seed Kentucky in the championship, a matchup that only .00016 percent of brackets correctly predicted. The more dominant teams in the field, the lesser the chance that they are upset and the greater the chance that we correctly pick those games.

2.) You need to either be a basketball savant, or have absolutely no knowledge at all. Common sense would tell you that the more you know about each team playing in a game, the better you’ll be able to predict the outcome. This means countless hours of watching basketball, studying statistics and having your significant other call you a nerd. Totally worth it.

Or, you can be on the other end of the spectrum and depend completely on luck. Malaquias4394 said that he didn’t watch one college basketball game all year, and now he has random college students writing about him. (Sidenote: he has Duke defeating Kansas 58-0 in the championship game. He must have really hated “The Wizard of Oz.”)

3.) You need a lot of fake ESPN accounts. ESPN allows you to enter a maximum of 10 brackets per account. Make 100 ESPN accounts, and that’s 1,000 brackets. Why doesn’t everyone do this?

4.) You need a cool name for your bracket. Nobody wants to be the team that loses and messes up the bracket with a cool name. Best ones I’ve seen in my lifetime: Church of Bracketology, Grand Theft Otto Porter Jr., John Calipari’s Recruiting Budget and What Channel is TruTV Again?

5.) You need to be able to take ridicule from your friends. “You picked UAB over Baylor? What’s wrong with you?”…“NC State in the Elite 8? I’m ashamed to be your friend.”

It’s important to remember that Thomas Edison was also looked at as crazy, and you could very well be the Thomas Edison of March Madness. And you could also join him, every Kardashian, and Jaden and Willow Smith in the “Getting Famous Off Stuff Other People Actually Did” club.

6.) You need to be from the future. Because if you had a time machine, wouldn’t making a perfect bracket be your first mission?

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