By TYLER GARNER
Sheridan High School Student
The Sheridan Student Column is brought to readers by Sheridan High School’s 10th grade English class, taught by Abby Williams.
March is here. That means spring is on its way, schools are going on spring break, but best of all, March Madness.
For those who don’t know, March Madness is a giant college basketball tournament that takes place in cities all over the U.S.A. These cities include Dayton, Indianapolis, Buffalo, Portland, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Greenville, San Diego, Milwaukee, San Antonio, San Francisco, Chicago, and last but certainly not least, New Orleans. If you are going to any of these places for spring break it would be worth the time to go to a game.
Going into the tournament, the top favorites to win are Gonzaga, Baylor, Kansas, and Arizona. Although these teams are very good, they do have a lot of competition to beat 64 other teams in the tournament, but the seeding gives the better teams the advantage to make it further into the tournament.
The seeding works by putting the one seed, which is the best team, on the opposite side of the bracket as the two seed, or second-best team. The one seed gets the largest advantage by playing the 16 seed first, or the worst team. The two seed gets the second largest advantage and gets to play the 15 seed, or second-worst team. This trend continues for every seed in the tournament until the eight seed meets the nine seed in the middle of the tournament.
When we get to the second round is when the tournament starts to get a little more confusing. The one seed still has the largest advantage, so they will play the winner of the game between the eight and nine seeds. They play them because no matter who wins, they get to play the lowest seed possible. The one seed can’t play a seed any worse than the nine seed in the second round because that game is the closest to them in the bracket. You have to remember that there is the possibility of the 16 seed beating the one seed, and if they do that, they are now in the same position that the one seed would be in. Because of this they would now have the same advantage that the one seed had.
Now we will talk about the extremely low possibility of picking a perfect bracket during March Madness. Every year hundreds of thousands of brackets are submitted to online bracket pools run by different online sports apps, but there has never been a recorded perfect bracket. We can’t be certain about this because there was a long period of time before these apps were created that people only submitted brackets on paper. What we can be certain of is that if they did submit a perfect bracket they are extremely lucky.
According to nbcconnecticut.com, the odds of a perfect bracket are one in two to the 63rd power. That is really one in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. To put that in perspective there are about 7,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on the earth, according to Quora. This means you have a higher chance of picking one grain of sand from anywhere in the world than you do of picking a perfect bracket on March Madness. When your bracket gets busted, because it will, don’t feel bad.