
Inside the Numbers of the 2016 NCAA Tournament
Your brackets are filled out, and it's time to go to work and pretend as if you're not watching the games. Or just stay home sick (cough, cough). The first weekend of the NCAA tournament is about the long shots. Amazingly, it's what we remember most, even though we only get a couple of Cinderellas every year and they almost never get through the weekend.
But there is something about the hope of the little guy that just sucks us in. That, and making sure you are the one who picked the right upsets and not Joe in the mailroom.
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The tournament is a national obsession. Or at least the bracket is. And here are the numbers to prove it.
124: Straight losses by No. 16 seeds in their first-round games against No. 1 seeds. That's 0-124 since the tournament went to 64 teams in 1985. Even the Washington Generals beat the Harlem Globetrotters once. Like Chicago Cubs fans, now 108 years without a World Series win, would say: You'd think it would happen once, even just by accident. Best chance this year: Hampton over Virginia. But it would take a big accident.
1 in 128 billion or 1 in 9.2 quintillion: Odds of picking a perfect bracket. Mathematicians disagree and figure it many different ways. (Quintillion is a number?). Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot hover around 1 in 292 million. But then you don't get to brag around the office.
80: Number of days from Stephen F. Austin's last loss until its first-round game Friday against West Virginia. Twenty straight wins.

22: John Calipari's $7 million salary is roughly 22 times the base salary of Steve Pikiell, head coach of America East champ Stony Brook, Kentucky's first-round opponent.
31: Number of points No. 16 Florida Gulf Coast—a.k.a. Dunk City—beat Fairleigh Dickinson by in the play-in game. Dunk City was maybe the most thrilling Cinderella ever, getting to the Sweet 16 in 2013 as a No. 15 seed. Repeat? Not this time. The Eagles face No. 1 UNC on Thursday.
72.1: Points that Duke allows per game—the first time they've given up over 70 since 2000. Duke also ranks 336th in the country in number of offensive rebounds it allows opponents. The Blue Devils lack depth and defense, too. Could be a quick tournament for them.
100: Percent certainty that Duke's Grayson Allen, who deserves the Christian Laettner Award as the latest Duke guy who everyone can't stand, will irritate somebody.
60 million: Americans fill out a bracket, per Wallet Hub and the Des Moines Register. That's about 50 percent more than the populations of greater New York, Los Angeles and Chicago combined. A Microsoft survey in 2009 said that 22 percent of bracket bettors expected their brackets to produce a better return than their 401K.
1.9 billion: Dollars that employers will lose in productivity, while workers watch the game, call in sick, stop work or slow down to pay attention to the tournament, per outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas (via Fortune). The firm says productivity could be off by $4 billion (via CNBC).
17.5 million/14.5 million. Number of barrels of American beer produced in March vs. the average number for the rest of the months (Wallet Hub/Des Moines Register) .
1.5 million: The average price of a 30-second TV ad in last year's title game (Wallet Hub/Des Moines Register).
296,723: The average dollar amount a Division I men's college basketball player is worth in revenue for his school (via Business Insider). Duke players are worth an average of $1.27 million. Louisville players are worth most, averaging $1.72 million.

0: Number of NCAA tournament games Yale (0-4) has won in its history. Not going to change now.
5: Number of national titles for Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. He also has been to 12 Final Fours.
5, Part II: Number of teams Oklahoma coach Lon Kruger has taken to the tournament. Kansas State, Florida, Illinois, UNLV and now OU. When he went with K-State, his top assistant was current Oregon coach Dana Altman.
50-50: Description of Northern Iowa, which has beaten three Top 25 teams, including North Carolina, and also lost to a bunch of really, really bad ones. It's 50-50 they'll be great or awful against Texas. As a result, some people pick Texas to get to the Final Four, and some pick a first-round loss.

II: You can't blame Oregon State's Gary Payton II for trying to get away from his nickname "The Mitten." His dad was famously "the Glove."
3-2-1: Oklahoma's Buddy Hield, college basketball's Stephen Curry, is great at shooting baskets worth any point total. As we found out during the Big 12 tournament, if half-court shots counted for an extra point, the category here would be 4-3-2-1.
32: Looking forward to a classic round-of-32 game between Kentucky and Indiana. Take Kentucky and Tyler Ulis.
9: The national ranking Wichita State holds in the Ken Pomeroy ratings. Yet the Shockers are seeded just 11th. That makes Arizona, which has to play them in the first round, the unluckiest team in America.
350 million: Impressions on Twitter and Facebook about the tournament last year (Wallet Hub/Des Moines Register).
11: Titles won by UCLA. Most of any team.
4: Final Four; Oklahoma, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan State; Winner: Kansas.
Check out Bleacher Report's live updating bracket to track your picks along the road to the Final Four. Greg Couch covers college basketball for Bleacher Report.



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