{"id":36968,"date":"2025-03-31T13:38:54","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T17:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=36968"},"modified":"2025-04-02T13:05:05","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T17:05:05","slug":"furmans-harris-talks-ncaa-brackets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/furmans-harris-talks-ncaa-brackets\/","title":{"rendered":"Furman&#8217;s Harris talks NCAA brackets with The Independent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Furman University&#8217;s John Harris, a mathematics professor, explained how difficult it is to predict an accurate NCAA basketball bracket. Harris, part of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/predicting-march-madness-is-a-numbers-game\/\">Furman team<\/a> that develops models to predict potential March Madness upsets, told London-based <a href=\"https:\/\/www.the-independent.com\/life-style\/march-madness-perfect-bracket-odds-ncaa-b2722970.html\">The Independent<\/a> that it&#8217;s almost impossible. \u201cFor each of these 63 games, there are two possible outcomes, and this means that there are a total of two raised to the 63rd power possible ways the tournament can play out,&#8221; Harris said. &#8220;This amounts to around 9.2 quintillion possible brackets, which is two quintillion greater than the estimated number of grains of sand on all of Earth\u2019s beaches and deserts.\u201d A math and computer science professor from Davidson College was also tapped for the article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In The Independent, Furman&#8217;s John Harris provides numerical context for just how difficult it is to predict an accurate bracket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":257,"featured_media":36971,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,50,3323],"tags":[764,3322],"class_list":["post-36968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-in-the-news","category-mathematics","category-the-independent","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaa-brackets"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/257"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36968"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37011,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36968\/revisions\/37011"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}