It's too late now, but if you filled out your bracket with Yahoo!, you were eligible to win $1 million, provided you submitted a perfect bracket.

Now, setting aside that the game is totally free, and that there's a legitimate $10,000 prize for the best bracket, I would argue that Yahoo!'s million-dollar prize is poor compensation for filling out a perfect bracket.

Let's do the math. There are 32 games in the first round, 16 in the second, eight in the third, four in the fourth, two in the fifth and one in the sixth. That adds up to 63. At worst, the games are a coin flip - like the ones between 7-10 and 8-9s - as well as some of the later games between top teams. And we can lop four games off (the 1-16s), just to make things more manageable. Still, I think we can conservatively say that overall on average you have no better than a 65/35 chance of picking a game correctly. (It's probably worse than that, but let's just be conservative).

So what are the chances of winning 59 straight at 65/35?

That's .65 to the 59th power = 9.15984E-12.

Or 1 in 9,159,840,000,000 - a little worse than 1 in 9 trillion. And if we take it down to 60 percent, (which is probably more realistic) it's 8.14561E-14 or 1 in 814,561,000,000,000 - 1 in 814 trillion.

So you see, Yahoo! could quite comfortably have offered a $1 billion dollar prize for the perfect bracket and not sweated it out too much.

Next year, RotoWire's going to build one, and I will make sure we offer at least $12 billion for any perfect bracket. If someone miraculously hits it (and it would qualify as a miracle of biblical stature), we'll just go the AIG route.