Here Are Your Odds Of Winning Toddy McShay's Million Dollars For Picking Every Player Selected in The First Round of The NFL Draft In Order

Todd McShay joined the Pardon My Take boys on this morning's pod. PFT asked him what his best year predicting picks was and one thing led to the other and all the sudden Todd McShay is now offering $1,000,000,000 to anyone who picks every player in order of the first round. Who wants to be a McShay Millionaire? Not only that but Big Cat and PFT are willing to match. As a miniscule particle of the PMT team, I thought I'd paint a picture of what the odds might be here on actually getting this. So I dusted off my finest, most rusted Casio calculator watch and a pocket protector so big I need to make a chiropractic appointment. I've got the math all worked out and ready to reveal. Spoiler alert, it's not great. But the best part is that even after you read what you're up against, that little piece of your (well, our) idiot brain will still think you (we) have a chance. 

Ok, how hard can this be really? Let's have a quick brainstorming session meeting with PMT members and AWLs and put our best thinking caps on to figure out how what the math is here. 

As the leader of this group team it's my duty to nod my head with a facial expression of being impressed and promptly replying "These are absolutely.... ideas" before going with the one that I thought of before the meeting even started. To Jake's credit, he's right in that we are at an advantage this year in only needing to guess 31 picks, so if there's ever a year this is gonna happen, its 2023. As far as trades go, the way I understood the conversation is that you only need to get the players picked all in order, so we're not worrying about what team anyone goes to. That should make things a little more doable.

The other thing we have going for us is that it's a lock that Bryce Young is going #1. That's a free space. Boom, only 30 picks we need to get now. Start thinking of what color you want on that Rari! 

This is where things get murky and assumptions need to be made. How many players are realistically possible for each pick? It's subjective but we can at least think through something plausibly realistic. I'm using the following based completely on feel and you're welcome to change the numbers yourself and write your own damn blog if you disagree.

1. Pick 1: FREE SPACE
2. Picks 2-5: Five possible players for each pick
3. Picks 6-10 Seven possible players…
4. Picks 11-20: Ten possible players…
5. Picks 21-31: 15 possible players
6. Pick 32: FREE SPACE

Hopefully this is close enough to buy into. The further down you go in Round 1, the wider the range of possible players teams have eyes on are. Let's consider bullet points 1 and 2 to start. 1 is a given and the odds of getting four picks when five possible players can be taken for each is 1 in 625. Holy fuck, permutations are a bitch. Let's just do the math for everything here and come up with how many possible arrangements are realistically possible for the entire first round. Answer:

908,602,792,053,222,595,924,440,842,206

What. The fuck. Is that? This number rivals what your phone screen reads after dialing a customer service number and having to verify to the recording every numerical piece of information that's ever been associated with you in your life before finally being transferred to an actual person where you have to repeat it all to them anyway. 9 commas. 30 digits. The gods of number making would call this 908 octillion.  

I had a little extra battery in the Casio watch left so I took another approach to help AWLs put it in AWL terms. Let's say we wanted to stack AWLs on top of each other to see how far we could go with 908 octillion AWLs. We'll say the average AWL is 6ft tall with shoes on. We'd be able to make it all the way to Pluto which is 4.67 billion miles away at it's furthest point in orbit. Not just one stack either. Try 221 quadrillion stacks. This is a much, much lower number that we have at least heard of but still can't comprehend. So I guess this entire scenario doesn't really help. Thanks for nothing Pluto. No wonder you got demoted. 

Let's try it this way. Big Cat has 1.6 million followers. PFT has a million and I have a gentleman's 11.5k to add to the pot making a total of 2,611,500 if you pretend there's zero overlap for sake of having a little fun. We would all simply need to do our part and pick 347923718955857770186804 unique selections to get a winner. I'm not even going to look up what that number is because it doesn't matter. Hypothetically speaking (as if we're not there already) if there were enough AWLs to all pick a unique draft selection and we pooled the winnings, we'd all be set for a payday of 0.0000000000000000000001100591% of a dollar. Team work pays guys!

Let's try one more way of thinking this through. I looked online for the odds of getting a perfect March Madness bracket and one estimation that takes into account a knowledgeable selector (not just random coin flips for 1 seeds vs 16, etc.) was about 1 in 120 billion. Picking a perfect NFL Round 1 based on my logic (and just 30 picks remember) would be even more rare than getting a perfect bracket two times in row. I tested for three years, but that's where the line is drawn as the only thing more rare than that would be Hank getting the lottery ball. That's the best I can do in trying to conceptualize what we're dealing with here. 

Now I know what you're all thinking. "Yeah, but… I think I got a shooters chance. I can narrow it down it a little more". That's the best part. Just like in March Madness when we first start filling in a few lines and get that "what if" idiot moron part of our brain feeling. I mean, think about it. If you guess the entire bracket one year, why wouldn't you be able to run it back another couple times? 

The race for the McShay Millions is officially on! Good luck AWLs.

- Jeffro