Get Sweet 16 Bracket Fill Out

With more than three decades of online and paper brackets to sift through (the current format has existed since 1985) and with somewhere between an estimated 60 million to 100 million brackets filled out every year, it's very possible that someone, somewhere has done better.

You start filling out your bracket by picking the teams you think will win each first round game. From there, you then pick the winners from all the games in your theoretical second round lineup. You repeat this process all the way through the final game. Once the tournament begins, you can't change any of your picks.

The most common method is to award 1 point for correct predictions in the first round, 2 in the second round, 4 in the third, 8 in the fourth, 16 in the fifth, and 32 in the sixth and final round. However, you could also go with a point scheme like 1-2-3-4-5-6 to make each round weighted more evenly.

Typically, the deadline to have your bracket completely filled out is right before the tipoff of the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

You start filling out your bracket by picking the teams you think will win each first round game. From there, you then pick the winners from all the games in your theoretical second round lineup. You repeat this process all the way through the final game. Once the tournament begins, you can't change any of your picks.

Typically, the deadline to have your bracket completely filled out is right before the tipoff of the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

As such, the number of possible outcomes for a bracket is 2^63, or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. That's 9.2 quintillion. In case you were wondering, one quintillion is one billion billions. If we treated the odds for each game as a coin flip, that makes the odds of picking all 63 games correctly 1 in 9.2 quintillion.