WASHINGTON — Brackets, busted.
The handful of remaining perfect brackets in the NCAA Tournament busted out on Sunday, ending the hopes of millions against exceptionally long odds.
The final perfect brackets on Yahoo Sports and CBS Sports were shredded with Saturday’s games. Top-seeded Florida’s 77-75 win over two-time reigning national champion UConn continued the carnage on Sunday.
Duke’s 89-66 win over Baylor left one remaining perfect bracket on ESPN’s tracker and it didn’t last long. That bracket imploded with Kentucky’s 84-75 win over Illinois, creating 24.3 million imperfect brackets.
The Wildcats’ win also killed off the last bracket of the 34 million on the NCAA’s platform.
Michigan’s 91-79 win over Texas A&M on Saturday night shredded the final perfect Yahoo Sports bracket. Poor Shawno had been correct on every pick with his Grand Bracket until the fifth-seeded Wolverines sent the fourth-seeded Aggies home.
CBS Sports lost its last perfect bracket with Saturday night’s games, including No. 6 seed BYU’s two-point win over third-seeded Wisconsin and Texas Tech’s 77-64 win over No. 11 seed Drake.
Creighton was listed as ESPN’s top bracket buster after its 89-75 win over Louisville in Thursday’s first game, knocking out 13,339,089.
On the other end of the spectrum, ESPN reported that every pick was wrong on 30 of its brackets — a nearly impossible feat in its own right even if a contestant were trying to pick all losers.
What’s the closest to perfect March Madness bracket?
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.
During the 2019 tournament, an Ohio man correctly guessed all the games going into the Sweet 16, according to NCAA.com. But his streak of 49 correct picks was ended when Purdue beat Tennessee 99-94 in overtime of the second game in the Sweet 16.
A record 22 million brackets were filled out on ESPN’s site in 2024, up 15% over the last year, with some of the early results knocking out millions. Mississippi State’s 69-51 loss to Michigan State and Brigham Young’s 71-67 loss to Duquesne each took out more than 9 million brackets. The biggest upset of the first day, third-seeded Kentucky’s 80-76 loss to Oakland, also did some damage: The third-seeded Wildcats were picked in 95% of brackets in the ESPN Tournament Challenge to beat the 14th-seeded Golden Grizzlies.
The last perfect men’s bracket in 2024 almost made it through the first round but was broken after No. 8 Utah State won over No. 9 TCU. It survived 31 games.
In 2023, it took just 25 games for there to be no more perfect brackets – after No. 16 FDU stunned No. 1 Purdue.
