The Billion Dollar Bracket

As many of you know, Quicken Loans, backed by Warren Buffett, offered up a billion dollars to anyone who could prepare a perfect bracket for this year's tournament. This is no small task, the odds of being struck by lightening while in a submarine at the bottom of the marianas trench might be better. And, still, a ton of people jumped into the tournament and prepared their brackets.

On day one many were knocked out thanks to the upsets.

On day two everyone else was booted. Duke losing was the nail in the coffin for most.

Then there's Brad Binder. Brad is, through the first 32 games, 32-0. He picked Mercer over Duke. He picked Dayton. He picked them all. At this point, he has 2 underdogs left in his brackets. SFA Lumberjacks who he has beating UCLA before losing, and Oregon, who he has in the final four. While the odds of him being perfect are slim, he is frighteningly accurate and his rationale for the upsets he chose indicate he knows what he's talking about so, perhaps, we will see Oregon in the final four and UCLA lose the Jacks (I hope so, they might be the only hope I have in winning my pools).

And yet, with all this genius, he made one major error.

The guy entered the bracket in yahoo's tournament but not in the billion dollar tournament. Had he entered it in the billion dollar pool, he could have called up quicken and said "I'll take 50 million now, rather than wait it out for the billion. y'all can donate the rest to charity."

sports.yahoo.com...



I just thought, with all the crap in the world, it would be nice to point out some serious genius. And laugh at his stupidity.

Yeah, my husband made up some stats based on average year-long performance. He picked Harvard, Dayton (which he later went back and second-guessed because he felt he had too many upsets), and Steven F. Austin. However, Duke, UMass, Arizona State and Oklahoma let him down.

He figures he'll keep tabs on how his initial try did this year, and take the reliability of his first try and go back and tweak his formula with some kind of weighting modifier for next year.

Did I mention my husband is a biostatistician and likes a numbers a lot?

He also said that if that was his bracket ... he'd have called 5 minutes ago.

reply to post by ketsuko


I have the lumberjacks beating UCLA mainly because my son loves their jerseys (Jackson uses the name Jacks for his NBA2k14 team)

The mercer and harvard picks are the most impressive to me. your husband should be proud of himself for nailing all those underdogs, even if he did second guess one of them. I need to remember that the ivy league schools have a history of knocking out the favorites.

And dayton prob just busted a bunch more brackets.... Who had the orange going down today...

reply to post by Sremmos80


I did but not against Dayton