A 1-in-Quadrillion Chance Is Worth $20 Million

A fledgling sports Web site is offering National Football League fans $20 million and tickets to the next 20 Super Bowls. All they have to do is correctly predict the league’s final regular-season standings, conference and Super Bowl winners.

It’s a feat much more improbable than the Philadelphia Eagles, a 120-1 longshot in Las Vegas, winning this year’s NFL title.

A mathematician figures that picking all 31 NFL teams’ final rankings in the standings and playoff outcomes is 100,000 times less likely than a commercial airliner crashing after it was hit by a meteor.

“I don’t think people should pack their bags for the Super Bowl just yet,” said Kenneth Alexander, a math professor at the University of Southern California.

The offer by Wayne, Pennsylvania-based Infonautics Inc., which is running the promotion through site www.20million.com, is the largest prize ever offered for an Internet sports contest, Web site analysts said.

Still, the chances of a casual sports fan winning are 1 in 1.3 quadrillion (That’s 13 with 14 zeros following it), Alexander said. The odds, meantime, aren’t much better for a hard-core NFL fan - at least 1 in 268 million - the professor said.

“This is a rough one,” Alexander said.

Infonautics, meantime, is rooting for someone to win - it has a $20,000 insurance policy backed by Lloyd’s of London that would pay the prize, and the publicity would drive traffic to its main site, www.sportssleuth.com, which gathers stories from Internet sites based on topics or favorite teams selected by users.

“It’s going to be exciting, because anyone who is an NFL fan is going to think they have a shot at this,” said Don Mennig, director of marketing for Infonautics.

Right now, neither site has attracted enough visitors to be measured by Media Metrix, a company that tracks Internet use, and Infonautics declined to release figures for either Internet address.

Not Alone

Infonautics isn’t the first upstart Web site looking to boost traffic with a inexpensive promotion that offers a big prize for a near-impossible task. In March, closely held Sandbox.com offered a $10 million prize for correctly predicting every game in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament - which Alexander said had a 1 in 5.7 billion chance of occurring.

Reston, Virginia-based Sandbox insured the promotion for less than $50,000.

The suspense lasted about 56 hours. Three days into the three-week long event, all 610,705 contestants were eliminated.

“I think it’ll create some buzz and hype among diehards and fantasy football, but it’s not going to bring them all the exposure they’re looking for,” said Christopher Todd, an Internet analyst at New York-based Jupiter Communications.

Mennig said his company thought about offering $100 million for the NFL promotion, but didn’t because the Internet domain www.100million.com was already taken.

Even so, Infonautics said it’s hoping to get 150,000 people to play. The company could use a boost. Its shares closed up 1/8 to 3 7/8, a 78% decline since February, and they hit a 52-week low of 3 3/4 Wednesday.

“Based on the odds, you have a better shot at hitting the lottery, but we think there’s a lot of people out there who think they know the NFL well enough to take a shot at it,” Mennig said. “It’s going to be a lot of fun.”