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Quicken Loans and Warren Buffett earned tricked their way onto national newscasts Tuesday and into headline coverage by both Detroit dailies, the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Huffington Post and at least 400 other media.
The news, if that's the right word, comes from the Detroit-based mortgage giant in a press release headlined "Quicken Loans’ Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge Offers $1 Billion Grand Prize for Perfect College Basketball Bracket."
Any qualified entrant who correctly enters the contest and predicts the winners of every game in the tournament will share the total $1 billion prize, paid in 40 annual installments of $25 million.
How sweet and newsworthy, right?
Well, maybe just one out of two.
It's definitely bait too sweet for the media to ignore. But it's also virtually a no-risk offer by the lender and its billionaire buddy, says a math whiz quoted by The Atlantic.
You might consider the odds of filling out a perfect March Madness bracket to be, well, small. You would be wrong. . . . The chances of correctly guessing all 63 games in the NCAA tournament are so vanishingly minuscule, they exist in the realm of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and "President Alec Baldwin."
Those odds are 1 in 128 billion, according to DePaul math professor Jay Bergen. . . .
If everyone in the United States filled out a bracket, Chris Chase [of USA Today] calculated, we'd get a $1 billion winner every 400 years.
In fairness, the company that Dan Gilbert built also dangles 20 more reachable prizes and $1 million in charity giveaways.
Quicken Loans will award $100,000 each to the contest’s 20 most accurate "imperfect" brackets submitted by qualified entrants in the contest to use toward buying, refinancing or remodeling a home.
In conjunction with the Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge, Quicken Loans will also be directly donating $1 million to inner-city Detroit and Cleveland nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to improving the education of young Detroit and Cleveland residents.
Still, senior editor Derek Thomspon of The Atlantic suggests in his reality check that Quicken and Buffett should have put quotation marks around their so-called "offer" -- as he does in posting this challenge:
I'm now . . . "offering" $1 billion to anybody who, in the next week, guesses the names of every sitting member of the House of Representatives in 2020.
