WASHINGTON — Fewer than 1% of NCAA Tournament brackets were still perfect after Thursday’s 16-game slate, according to several services where fans attempt the all-but impossible task of predicting every March Madness game correctly — or, barring that, win their office pools.
ESPN’s tracker listed 25,802 perfect brackets remaining out of more than 24 million filled out on its site following the final game of the day, Texas Tech’s win over UNC-Wilmington.
The NCAA said 0.0938% of more than 34 million brackets were still perfect.
The numbers were similar at CBS Sports, where 0.09% of brackets were unblemished following the first day of action.
Yahoo Sports said 99.9% of its brackets had fallen short of perfection after 11th-seeded Drake beat No. 6 seed Missouri.
Earlier Thursday, about 6.6 million brackets were busted on ESPN when No. 12 seed McNeese beat No. 5 seed Clemson 69-67.
Creighton — which saw a boost in this category because it played the first game of the day — was listed as ESPN’s top bracket buster after its 89-75 win over Louisville. There were 13,339,089 ESPN brackets busted by that game.
According to NCAA.com, the odds of picking a perfect bracket at random — not even counting the play-in games — is 1 chance out of 2 to the 63rd power, which is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or about 1 in 9.2 quintillion (give or take 20 quadrillion or so). According to University of Hawaii researchers, that is more brackets than the number of grains of sand on Earth.
However, NCAA.com also notes that the odds are more like 1 in 120.2 billion, if the person making the bracket takes into account info about which teams are better and tournament history.
It’s believed that the closest anyone has gotten to a perfect bracket occurred in 2019.