The NCAA national title basketball game won’t be played until Monday.
Your guess is as good as mine who will be in it.
There is one thing I know neither you, me, Warren Buffett nor Verne Lundquist can do. That’s pick a perfect March Madness bracket. 
We are assured of this by Jo McGinty, the Wall Street Journal’s super math guru.
He says that if you’ve never filled out a perfect NCAA March Madness bracket, don’t feel bad. No one has but they keep trying.
It’s your money
This year, 40 million people bet $4.6 billion on 149 million brackets in the tournament, says the American Gaming Association.
To achieve perfection, you had to correctly pick the winners of 63 games between 126 teams.
This year, one fan accurately predicted a record 50 consecutive games before a miss, the NCAA reported.
The record had been 39 consecutive accurate picks. 
The odds of picking the winners in every game of the single elimination tournament are astronomical.
In 2014, Warren Buffett, the billionaire Oracle of Omaha, was so sure no one could do it, he offered $1 billion to anyone who filled out a perfect bracket.
He has since offered $1 million a year for life to any employee of Berkshire Hathaway or its subsidiaries who predicts all Sweet 16 teams. 
No one has.
What are your odds?
With 63 games, there are 9.2 quintillion possible combinations of winners and losers, or 2 to the 63rd power. If the opponents in each game are evenly matched, the odds of a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
In the early rounds, the best teams play the worst teams. If a top seed has a bad game, it blows brackets.
Last year, the University of Virginia were knocked out in the 1st round by the University of Maryland-Baltimore – the 1st time a No. 1 seed lost to a No. 16 seed.
Mathematician Jeff Bergen weighed seeds based on their odds of winning. He forecast No. 1 seeds would win 100% of the time in Round 1. 
Last year he was wrong.
Following similar principles, the NCAA reached a slightly rosier prediction.
Even more odds
Based on its data, No. 1 seeds have beaten No. 16 seeds in 135 of 136 games in 34 tournaments. If each matchup followed historic probabilities, the NCAA calculated the odds of a perfect bracket at 1 in 46.6 billion. 
Because the average fan is correct only two-thirds of the time, the NCAA says the odds of a perfect bracket are closer to 1 in 120 billion.
Please let me know how you did. I’ll give a copy of “The Book of Hard Choices” to the fan with the highest number of correct picks.
The Sports Grouch welcomes readers’ emails at ChronicleSports@yahoo.com