Missouri's fall from the top ten in the country to an 11th seed in the 2011 NCAA Tournament is well-documented, but their March Madness odds have never been laid quite so bare for me: Ken Pomeroy of Basketball Prospectus has officially put them down as 833:1 shots. He starts off by giving them a 43% chance to win their first-round matchup against Cincinnati, and it only gets uglier from there.
Missouri's a flighty team, and that has downside—like, for instance, when they spent most of 2011 tumbling out of the Top 25—but it also makes high-odds games like this a little easier to stomach. I don't think this is a team that can win the NCAA Tournament, but if it's having a good week it could get deep enough into March Madness to avoid premature, uh, madness.
At least it beats Alabama State, who finishes with a one in 1090873445634 chance of winning the NCAA Basketball Tournament in 2011. Those are, to the institution's credit, slightly better odds than the team has of winning the 2010 NCAA Basketball Tournament, or the post-apocalyptic 2015 NCAA Basketball Tournament, in which Alabama State's practice gym houses a rag-tag band of survivors who've created a micronation from which to fight the zombies and legislate the new-world order. (It's a serious distraction.)