poo-pooing your perfect bracket dreams

It's that time of year: NCAA brackets are probably going around your office as I write this, and there's a good chance you've either just finished filling one out or are working on your final draft. Before you get too excited about your chances of getting a perfect bracket, read this heartbreaker from blogger The Mighty MJD:

http://www.themightymjd.com/2005/03/final-four-is-locked-in.html

And just because I wanted to mention it somewhere... do you know what your chances were of filling out an actual perfect bracket, with every game right? According to computer programmer Brannon Shadrick, your odds are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. That's more than 9.2 quintillion. Just as a point of reference... there aren't that many pubic hairs in the world. Not even close. Not even if you count all the ones that have been shaved. That is not a fathomable number. Your odds of filling out a perfect bracket are worse than your odds of winning the lottery, being struck by lightning, and being bitten by a shark, all in the same day.

This begs the obvious question... who counted all those pubic hairs? And how do you calculate the odds of being bitten by a shark?

For more sports-related weirdness, check this out (thanks to Armak for the link). It's a list of some of the best names in sports—though I don't see how they missed Stubby Clapp and Coco Crisp.

http://www.chortler.com/22399sports.shtml