For many people March equals college basketball, and once again March Madness rolls across the screen in American homes.

But for some, making predictions and creating the perfect bracket is often more important than the games themselves.  But what many people don’t really realize is that the odds of you picking a perfect March Madness bracket are not just awful, they’re almost impossibly bad.

The odds of having a perfect bracket is over 9.2 quintillion-to-1 (yep, quintillion). In fact, the odds are so bad that if every individual person in the world completed a bracket, the odds are a billion-to-one against any of them being perfect.

These odds can easily turn March Madness into March sadness, yet every year more and more people, even non-sport fans, are filling out brackets hoping that theirs is better than everyone else’s.

It is estimated that over 9 billion dollars will be illegally wagered on March Madness this year.   $9 billion could buy you the Los Angeles Lakers… 9 times.

You could argue that the old bracket tradition has gone out of hand, and instead of a fun tradition, has turned into an illegal billion dollar industry. Maybe we should start concentrating on the actual sport and the inspiring young talents playing it.