You Know What The Odds Are On That? Impossible To One.

It's March once again, and the NCAA ignored the pleas of office managers across the country and released the matchups for their annual college basketball tournament on Sunday. Every year 64 teams are given the chance to compete to be the last team standing, to be the ones cutting down that final net, to be the ones CBS shows clips of while playing what is possibly the most pathetic song of all time, "One Shining Moment."

Ok, let me sidetrack for a moment and say how much I dislike that song. It really just is not good. However, I do appreciate the honesty of CBS and the NCAA for marketing the tournament with a song that points out that for most of these college athletes, this is their one shining moment. The lyrics might as well say, "All the good players have already gone pro. This is as good as it's ever going to get for you. Get ready to go sell cars, or if you are lucky play basketball in Europe." It's actually much more of dream killer than you realize at first. Sorry for the tangent, now back to my point.

64 teams are in the tournament and are broken down into four regions. Each region has teams seeded from 1 to 16, based on previous performance and how well they are expected to do. In the history of the 64-team field, no #16 seeded team has ever beaten a #1 seed. In fact, the very high seeds (1-5) almost exclusively win the championship. Despite this disparity, they continue with this set up and odds makers give us the odds for each team to win the championship no matter how remote.

This year, ESPN.com columnist Gene Wojciechowski has written an article discussing the odds given by Danny Sheridan for each team to win the tournament. He points out how extremely high some of the odds are. For example, Nashville-based Belmont is given 10 billion to 1 odds. Fortunately for the Bruins, they are not the longest odds Sheridan gives to a team. Not even close, in fact. Oral Roberts University is given odds of 5 sextillion to one. This is a completely absurd number. That's like saying that as bad as he believes Belmont's chances are, Oral Roberts is 500 billion times less likely to win the entire tournament. How do you come up odds like this? How do you find anyone willing to take the bet? Was Sheridan aware that this is Oral Roberts University's basketball team not just one 88-year old televangelist we are talking about right? (Though I could make the argument that if the man can raise the dead as he claims he can, he can certainly win 6 basketball games in a row.)

This made me think back to when I was in high school, and I saw that Liberty was listed as a 1 trillion to one longshot to win the tournament. I began pondering a question then that I have yet to have answered. This question becomes even more important after seeing this year's odds. If I put down one dollar on Oral Roberts to win the tournament, and they win, I will receive 5 sextillion dollars ($5 X 10²¹), which should be just enough to allow me to live comfortably for the rest of my life. To win the tournament, a team has to win six consecutive games. If I were to bribe the starting five players of each team with one billion dollars each to throw the games, that would be 30 billion dollars. Do you know what $5 X 10²¹ minus 30 billion is? It's still $5 X 10²¹. I would have enough money that 30 billion dollars would be a completely insignificant amount. It would be like giving somebody a dime. I would have so much money that I would actually probably have more than the rest of the world combined. All of society would come to a halt and be subject to my whims. Inflation would make everything too expensive for anyone to buy...except me. I would rule over all civilization (as an enlightened despot, of course). What is there to prevent this from working (aside from the mob-owned casino that took the bet killing me instead of paying)? Am I the only person who thinks of these things, or would my plan be foiled by a similar idea from some guy who bet 10 bucks on Albany instead?

Now that I think about it, maybe I shouldn't have revealed my master plan to you.

Until later...