Basketball Hall of Famer Charles Barkley used his platform as one of the country's favorite basketball analysts to skewer former President Barack Obama's NCAA bracket on Wednesday.
March Madness is the nickname for the NCAA tournament, one of the most exhilarating sporting spectacles in the country. However, as millions of people fill out their brackets, picking how they believe will win it all, millions of other people will be looking to lambast those same brackets.
"He went with the traditional pick, everyone is picking UConn [...] so he's just copying off someone else's paper," said Barkley, when analyzing Obama's men's bracket on the CNN show "King Charles."
The 11-time NBA All-Star and Auburn University alum were equally unimpressed with Obama's women's bracket as well.
"See, he just went chalk. He picked South Carolina because everybody in the world picks South Carolina."
"I only fill out one. All those other fools be filling out like five. That's one of the 10 commandments: you only get one bracket. One bracket, fools," he laughed.
Going with the "chalk" is a colloquial way of saying an individual simply picked the top-ranked teams to win. However, part of March Madness is witnessing moments in which David rises to beat Goliath on the big stage.
In 2023, visiting professor at the US National Museum of Mathematics, Tim Chartier said that predicting the entire bracket correctly was nearly impossible. Like saying: "I'm going to pick one second in 292 billion years, and your job is to tell me which second I pick."
Chartier outlines that after running some calculations himself, he came up with some probabilities which helped better put it into perspective.
"So you have better odds of winning the Powerball with two consecutive tickets than getting a perfect bracket," he said. "You've better odds that a family of four will all get hit by lightning in their lifetime than picking a perfect bracket.
"There is a stat out there that there's a one in 10,000 chance that you get injured by a toilet. So there are better odds that that same family of four all get injured by the toilet than picking a perfect bracket."
According to CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten, 25% of people have picked No. 1 seed UConn to win the men's tournament, while 46.1% of picks predict NC State will be the biggest first-round upset.
