Every year, millions of people in the U.S. and around the world fill out brackets for March Madness in hopes of picking a perfect bracket and winning their pool. On both the men’s and women’s sides, you would need to correctly pick the winners of the 67 games, with the first four games played throughout the tournament. While this has never happened before, some people have been close.
The longest streak of perfectly picked games for the men, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), happened in 2019 when Gregg Nigl from Columbus, Ohio, correctly picked the first 49 games of the men’s tournament. The longest run in the women’s bracket happened last year when a bracket perfectly predicted the first 54 games before the bracket fell when the LSU Tigers knocked off the UCLA Bruins in the Elite Eight.
This year, according to the NCAA, on the men’s side, there were 36 million brackets filled out on the major online apps, such as ESPN, CBS, Yahoo and others. On the women’s side, there were 5.2 million filled out on the major apps. As of March 26, following the conclusion of the round of second round, there was one perfect bracket remaining on the women’s side and zero on the men’s side.
The longest-lasting perfect bracket for the women’s side this year belongs to eighth grader Otto Schellhammer of Pennsylvania, who has accurately guessed the first 48 games. Despite what this accomplishment might suggest, Schellhammer claims to know nothing about basketball and only made a bracket for fun with his friends. As for if this bracket will be the one we’ll just have to wait and see.
This year on the men’s side, the best bracket belonged to user Christienter, who submitted their bracket on ESPN. Christienter’s bracket survived to game 44 before No. 6-seeded Tennessee defeated No. 3 Virginia. With all the upsets in this year’s March Madness, only 224 brackets survived the first round and only 11 users correctly predicted the Sweet Sixteen teams. This is lower than years past, last year 113 brackets correctly guessed the Sweet Sixteen.
ESPN’s fantasy app has a feature where you can see the ‘biggest bracket busters,’ and this year that title belongs to No. 8 Ohio State, on the men’s side, with their loss to No. 9 TCU dropping 15,913,198 brackets. On the women’s side No. 14 Charleston’s loss to No. 3 Duke ruined 198,511 brackets, earning it the title. While this is a nice feature and makes for some fun facts, it is a bit inaccurate, as the teams that play first are more likely to bust more brackets, as there are more perfect brackets to ruin.
The odds of choosing a perfect bracket is around one in 9.2 quintillion if you were to flip a coin for each game. To put that in perspective, 9.2 quintillion seconds is 292 billion years. However if you have significant knowledge of basketball the odds drop significantly to one in 120.2 billion which, in seconds, is about 3811 years.
So, all things considered, while a perfect bracket is possible, it is extremely unlikely and would require a significant stroke of luck due to the unpredictability that comes with all college basketball but especially during March Madness. However, with NIL deals producing powerhouses on a new level, March has become a little bit more predictable and who knows, maybe next year you’ll have the perfect bracket.
