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No one has ever had a perfect bracket. This year’s NCAA Tournament is not over yet but all the perfect brackets are gone long ago.
The tournament concludes with the Final Four, which is a shocker this season with one No. 4 seed, two No. 5 seeds and one No. 9 seed.
The NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985. There are 63 total games if you do not count the First Four as most pools do not. There are millions of brackets in office pools, competitions among friends, wagers and now online. None of the recorded brackets have been perfect.
There are 9.2 quintillion ways to fill out a 64-team bracket. The odds of picking a perfect bracket are essentially 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
If you filled out one bracket per second, it would take you 292 billion years to fill out all the possibilities.
A few years ago, billionaire Warren Buffett offered one billion dollars to anyone who could select a perfect bracket. Millions tried, but Buffett kept the billion. Nowadays, his contest is only offered to his Berkshire Hathaway employees, but no one has been able to retire early off the billion.
No strategy has ever worked.
Some use their deep college basketball knowledge to fill out their brackets. Others choose based on team color or mascot. Some pick randomly, while others flip a coin to select a winner.
Some people win their pools without ever watching a basketball game all season. Sometimes a dog choosing the games ends up with the winning bracket.
After the first day of the 2023 tournament, many brackets were busted. No. 15 seed Princeton took down No. 2 seed Arizona, which ruined many right off the bat. Then came No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson taking down No. 1 Purdue with the biggest upset in the sport’s history.
ESPN hosts its tournament pool online, making it one of the biggest in the world, with millions of entries. Entering the first Friday (Day Two of the tournament), only 0.003% of brackets were still perfect of the 20 million brackets entered on ESPN.
Only 787 brackets remained perfect after Day One. No brackets were perfect after the first round concluded.
Guess the Lakers players!
