Every year, around the early going of March, they come out. Fresh, clean and full of potential, the Men’s NCAA tournament brackets are your chance to be Nostradamus for a day. It’s an amazing annual event where the everyday fan becomes part of the action by selecting who he or she believes will win each tournament game, and who will reach the Final Four and eventually, win the national championship. With the millions of bracket creations that emerge each year come the promises from Web sites and companies for the reward of good predictions. Companies often offer millions of dollars, or even a million pizzas, for a perfect bracket. You think that going for that perfect NCAA tournament bracket for a million dollars is a good deal? Forget it, you’re better off trying to win the lottery fives times. You can try as hard as you can and research the teams as much as you want, but after 2 rounds, your bracket is just as ruined as everyone else’s. ESPN received thousands of online submissions this year for its “ESPN Tournament Challenge,” but not one survived the first round. One would think that, with the millions of brackets made annually, somebody would have to get it right; but the odds have shown why the opposite has occurred. If you took each of the 63 tournament games and gave each team a fifty percent chance to win, you’d be looking at about 1:2^63 odds of picking a perfect bracket (that’s one in 9 quadrillion). Of course, the seedings and favorites of the tournament make many picks much easier and increase the chances of perfection exponentially. The numbers, however, are still staggering. According to Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal, the most generous odds of flawlessly selecting your college hoops teams is about one in 150 million. Other predictions, however, have put the chances upward of one in 240 billion. We live in a world fueled by expert opinions: Wall Street, politicians, researchers and the likes. We often take the opinions and estimates of others as fact. So it’s a wonderful diversion when something as simple as the brackets come along that are fun, engrossing, relevant and most of all, absolutely random. This is what makes pools based off of the brackets so much fun. Even if you choose on the basis of which school’s name sounds cooler, you’re probably going to get as many picks correct as some professional analysts. So if you happened to have thought Siena, Villanova and Davidson were cool names this year, you looked like a pure genius. You could also take the popular mascot route and look at college teams based upon what masked entertainer happens to be dancing up and down the court. You think a boilermaker is better than a bear? A badger beats a titan? Or that a bulldog will succumb to my personal favorite, the hilltopper (which is actually some sort of red blob)? You’d be right this year. But then again, there’s always the problem with repeat mascots. In this year’s tournament, you’d have to choose among the Villanova, Kentucky, Kansas State, Davidson and Arizona Wildcats and the Georgia, Drake, Mississippi State, Gonzaga and Butler Bulldogs. This bracket experience would be much better if only a team with a Minuteman mascot had been invited to the big dance – but that’s a story for the back page. In a world of pampered, “show me the money” athletes, the NCAA tournament is a wonderful change in that the athletes are just as young and poor as the rest of us college folk. The stars of the show are students rather than filthy rich stars that flood the rest of television. So if you’re enjoying a Men’s NCAA tournament game, but have a big exam to study for, don’t worry. So do they. Nicholas O’Malley is in it to win it. He can be reached at [email protected].