Hoping to have the perfect March Madness bracket this year? Well,  it’s pretty much impossible!

“If you were to stack the amount of paper it would take to fill in every bracket with every possibility among the 68 teams who will play 67 games over the next three weeks, it would not fit inside the universe,”  says Michael Weimerskirch, a math professor at Augsburg College.    In fact the odds of picking a perfect bracket randomly are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 1, or more than nine quintillion to one.

Here’s some more March Madness Fun Facts to impress your friends with!

  • March Madness was first used to describe the NCAA basketball tournament in 1982 by CBS reporter and Billings native Brent Musburger.
  • The FBI estimates that more than $2.5 billion is illegally wagered annually on March Madness each year. Less than 4% of that amount is wagered legally in Nevada.
  • Last year American businesses lost an estimated $1.2 billion in worker productivity during the NCAA tournament.
  • Challenger estimates that online viewership is likely to reach 8.4 million hours during the 3 week tournament, meaning the total financial impact from lost productivity due to people watching this year’s tournament will come in at over $192 million.

Tell us who you think is going to win in our March Madness survey!

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