Offering a million dollars for a complete bracket is a safe marketing bet by ESPN that stirs up considerable interest with very little risk. There are 263 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 possible ways to fill out a bracket given the play-in game is not counted, and only one way to win that money. If we assume that a bracket weighted with knowledge of the game improves those odds by about 6 orders of magnitude (base 2), let's say the four 16-1 gimmes and two other games, and that the 3.65 million participants of ESPN's Tourney challenge each entered a unique bracket (didn't happen, but irrelevant), the odds of ESPN paying up each year are about 0.0000000002814%, which will not happen in our lifetime, or in the expected lifetime of the human species. In fact, the odds of ESPN paying up at least once between now and 900 million years from now (when the surface of the Earth becomes inhospitable due to gradually rising solar luminosity) is only about 0.3%.
If during those 900 million years, ESPN invested their million dollars in an average mutual fund (with a nominal interest rate of 5%), they'd double their money every 14 years and have a total of 264285714 million dollars at heat death Armageddon. However, if the treasury was continually printing $100 bills (about 264285727 of them by the end) to allow ESPN to cash out their savings to actual currency (which is ridiculous, but bear with me), at a point of about 5 solar masses (1 gram per bill) their combined weight would collapse Earth to a singularity. This would happen in only about 1,416 years. This is without considering that college basketball would become a much more difficult game to play as the surface gravity of Earth steadily rose under all those dollar bills. So I think it's safe to say that we should either rob ESPN or stop this whole bracket thing sooner rather than later.
The Earth would look roughly like this in 3424 A.D.thanks to ESPN. You, as the observer, would also die
if you got this close.
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