The 2025 NCAA Tournament is right around the corner, and the chase to the perfect March Madness bracket has officially begun. Millions of people around the globe fill out their brackets each year with the dream of doing something that has never been done before.
Yet, the chase for perfection continues!
What Are the Odds of Getting a Perfect NCAA Bracket?
The thought of getting every game right is absolutely adrenaline-inducing. The reality is that the odds of achieving perfection are near impossible.
The NCAA states that if every game were treated as a coin flip, the chances of picking all 63 games correctly are 1 in 9.2 quintillion. While having hoop knowledge increases the odds, it is only a slight improvement.
In fact, mathematician Jeff Bergen once noted that you have a better chance of winning the lottery multiple times than filling out a perfect March Madness bracket.
Additionally, apart from the already insane numbers, many unpredictable factors come into play. These include travel schedules, injuries, and the immense pressure on young athletes, which make the tournament unpredictable.
However, some experts do believe that a perfect bracket could happen if every team followed its trajectory based on seeding. It still is near impossible. For example, in 2018 it was almost certain that No. 1 seed Virginia would advance. But that’s not what happened.
In a rather chaotic match, No. 16 seed UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) pulled off a historic upset by defeating Virginia 74-54. To add on, this was the first time that a No. 16 seed had ever beaten a No. 1 seed, breaking a streak of 135 consecutive wins by No. 1 seeds.
What Is the Best NCAA Tournament Bracket Ever Recorded?
In 2019, a neurologist named Gregg Nigl had the longest streak of correct picks in a single NCAA tournament. He correctly picked the first 49 games of the men’s tournament.
But what Nigl could not predict was Purdue’s win over Tennessee in the Sweet 16. Since the brackets began in 2014, nobody has come close to topping that number. Before Nigl, the closest anyone had come was in 2017, when a bracket correctly picked the first 39 games. Yet again, Purdue was the dark horse nobody saw coming.
KEEP READING: Joe Lunardi’s Final Bubble Watch
Purdue went on to take down Iowa State and break the bracket. Talking about more recent brackets, the 2023 NCAA men’s tournament had a decent run, but all brackets were broken after just 25 games when No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson University won against No. 1 Purdue.
In 2024, the last perfect men’s bracket fell on the 31st game when No. 8 Utah State defeated No. 9 TCU. Despite it all, the dream of a perfect March Madness bracket lives on. But if history is testimony, much like all years, the bracket might just be broken.
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