Hey Buffett, you can breathe now

It took less than two full days of play for Warren Buffett to win his bet that no entrant in a Quicken Loans contest would predict the winner of each game in the three week NCAA Tournament.

Had someone been successful, his Berkshire Hathaway would have been responsible for paying a $1 billion prize as part of an insurance policy it sold to the lender.

Two upsets - Dayton’s defeat of Ohio State two days ago and Mercer’s victory Friday against Duke - wiped out 99 percent of the entries. When Memphis defeated George Washington on Friday night, the last of the perfect brackets was busted.

“While everyone loves an underdog, you could hear a collective groan around the office each time an upset happened,” Jay Farner, president and chief marketing officer of Quicken Loans, said in an e-mailed statement. “We knew that meant a lot of the entrants had their brackets bust and lost their opportunity at the billion dollars.”

The contest was announced in January and proved a publicity bonanza for Buffett, 83, and Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert. Print and broadcast media focusing on sports, business and general news have covered the contest and speculated about the probability of a winner emerging.

Both companies declined to say how much the insurance cost.

Calculating the exact odds of a perfect bracket is impossible, because picking the winner of a game isn’t a random event like a coin flip, Buffett said. That’s especially true in the first round when the top-seeded teams almost always prevail.

“I charged a premium that was a reasonable amount above what I thought the odds were,” he told ESPN before the tournament began. “I had another guy at Berkshire Hathaway make his own calculation, independent of me, and we were in the same ballpark.

But it was a pretty big ballpark.”

Eat your veggies

From Janice Hough of leftcoastsportsbabe.com: “For a number of Jets fans, isn’t NY releasing Mark Sanchez and signing Michael Vick like your mom telling saying you don’t have to eat the broccoli but she’ll replace it with brussel sprouts ?”

Musicial genius

Chad Thomas, a senior at Booker T. Washington High School in Miami, is an All-American football player who has received more than 150 college scholarship offers.

He also plays the piano, trombone, tuba, small tuba, guitar, bass guitar, trumpet and drums.

The teenage sensation, who helped his team to a national title and back-to-back state championships, was only 3 years old when he developed a passion for music, after his grandmother played gospel music for him.

Thomas has signed a national letter of intent with Miami.

“Football is not for long,” Thomas said. “I can go down with a knee injury tomorrow, but I know I’ll always be able to move my fingers and play an instrument.”

Quote of the day

“Sometimes you just need the adrenaline of a regular-season game, and I just feel relieved to get this one under my belt.” Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw following Saturday’s 3-1 victory over Arizona in Sydney, Australia

Sports, Pages 24 on 03/23/2014