Making a billion dollars is easy. Go to Yahoo.com, fill out an National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, tournament “March Madness” bracket, get all your picks right, and BOOM $1 billion dollars. Warren Buffett, billionaire, entrepreneur, and President of Berkshire Hathaway, is willing and able to front the money with Quicken Loans acting as the conglomerate. Winning is so easy, a caveman could do it…well, not really. Your chances of winning are 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808; that’s one in 9.3 QUINTILLION. If every person on earth filled out a hundred brackets per day, it would take 13 million years for someone to get a perfectly correct one.

 As the first day of the tournament progressed, cubicles, offices, and classrooms echoed “Well there goes my billion dollars” all across America. Is your bracket no longer perfect? No problem, the top twenty first place finishers will receive $100,000. The only catch is that the money must go towards purchasing or remodeling a home. As of Mar. 27, 18,841 there were perfect brackets left, just 0.17% of the original 11 million submitted. Payments will be issued in $25 million installments over the next 40 years or a single lump sum of $500 million.

 If you think a billion dollars is a large amount of money, you should have a word with American employers. Studies estimate that a billion, yes, a billion dollars PER HOUR is lost in productivity and bandwidth use as a result of the tournament. Employers nationwide fear “March Madness” for the sole reason that employees will stream games on their work computers, phones, and spend the whole day checking scores for their bracket pools. “I typically use my iPad, tethered to my phone to watch games in school. It can be distracting, but it brings the class together and helps keep me focused on my bracket because I’m in a paid league that I really want to win,” said senior Ian Little.

 For many people, the realistic victory is not the billion dollars, but the money from their brackets with their friends, neighbors, or coworkers. “I’m in a league with my dad, some of his friends, and a few of my friends. There was a $10 buy in and the winner gets the $150 pot. Unfortunately, I’m not doing so hot because I picked Duke to go far, but they were upset in the first round,” said freshman Jake Hazlett.

 One person, who will for certain not be winning a billion dollars, is President Barack Obama. Every year for the past six years, Obama gets together with ESPN analyst Andy Katz to air his bracket choices live on ESPN. One day into the tournament, his bracket ranked in the early two millions, placing him in the 74th percentile. Not far off from the President is junior Sydney Sherman. “My bracket was in the 89th percentile, but I slid down to 83%,” said Sherman.

Most basketball fans can agree that March is the best month of the year. Although March is creeping towards completion, the best of the madness is yet to come. “Even with only half of the tournament completed, I feel like there has been more excitement and uncertainty than any March I can ever remember. I can’t wait for it to end, but I will be sad when it’s over,” said Little.