The perfect bracket

Running with the same mathematical assumptions as above, the task is to guess 63 games correctly. This results in a one-inquintrillion chance the perfect bracket a perfect. ESPN said no perfect brackets remained on its site with the first round of the men's NCAA Tournament completed. That's 0 perfect brackets out of. “No one's had a perfect bracket,” said Brandon Banes, an assistant math professor at Lipscomb University. According to the NCAA, the longest. Ina neuropsychologist in Columbus, Ohio, picked the greatest known bracket in men's NCAA basketball history. How he pulled it off is.

The longest an NCAA bracket has ever stayed perfect

How all men's and women's brackets busted in the 2024 NCAA tournaments

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The Associated Press. More From AP News. Copyright The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. The team format was introduced in , and within five years, the NCAA tournament had become synonymous with office pools. Many featured entry fees and prizes, which technically made them illegal but catnip for millions of employees over the years.

He played in the first team tournament and doesn't remember a single person mentioning filling out a bracket. Now picking a bracket is an essential part of his job, and it might be his least favorite part of being an analyst. The perfect bracket He spends five minutes applying everything he knows when making his picks, then he never looks at it again.

He neither feels high nor low when he does well or badly because he knows the truth: There's no realistic chance, regardless of data, a high-level hoops background, or a crystal ball, that someone can run the table deciphering how college men and women are going to do over a month-long one-and-done basketball tournament.

That doesn't mean there isn't plenty of strategy to consider. Illinois professor Sheldon Jacobson has spent 20 years studying the NCAA tournament, and he has come to several interesting conclusions. On his website, Bracket Odds, he suggests working inside-out when you fill out a bracket, sorting out the Final Four or Elite 8 and going backward because most pools will be won by the people who rack up the biggest points from the end of the tournament rather than the beginning.

Jacobson has found that the single best factor is also the most obvious: seeding. As wild as early-round games are, and as fun as it can be to see a George Mason or Saint Peter's come out of nowhere to make a run, the best strategy over time is to fight the urge to nail the seed who'll win one game and simply load up on the highest-seeded teams.

In women's hoops, only top-three seeds have ever won the tournament, with 22 of 28 champs being No. On the men's side, a No. And yet, Jacobson thinks the Selection Committee does an overall bad job with seeds. He says the data shows that the top and bottom seeds -- 1s and 2s, 15s and 16s -- are usually spot on and that the next tier , are very close every year.

But he thinks the committee routinely whiffs on , usually underseeding non-power conferences. His favorite value pick is the 11 seeds, who have gone overall since The 11s that advance are then in the second round against either the 3 or 14, creating a surprisingly frequent road into being an 11 seed in the Sweet But Bilas, Jacobson and Nigl all agree about what the single biggest factor of any great bracket is: pure luck.

Nigl picked mostly teams he'd never seen play a minute of basketball. Of the four and seeds to win in the opening round, Nigl got all four of them right, a virtually impossible feat. On a recent Zoom call, he still shakes his head about his remarkable bracket. By the time he got to Vermont on that Sunday, he began to realize he must be doing quite well.

The Ohio State- Houston game was on, and he smiled when he saw the dreaded Buckeyes were down at halftime. He lives in Columbus, likes Columbus, and has quite a few Buckeye friends He went to bed that night warm and fuzzy thinking of the No. Nigl has a soothing, steady voice, and he rarely uses more words than he needs to.

It's easy to imagine a veteran needing help and finding it in Nigl. But in the middle of the Zoom, Nigl lowers his voice a bit and says, "I haven't told very many people this," and he proceeds to tell a story about a ghost bracket, a mysterious phone call from the NCAA and how his life has never been the same.

In disbelief, he was told that he had picked the first 48 games of the men's tournament correctly, something that the NCAA believes had never happened before. His bracket was in a group called "center road," and it was the only bracket in the entire group. At first, none of it made sense to Nigl. When did he fill out an NCAA. Why was the pool named Center Road?

Why was he the only one in the group. Nigl shrugs his shoulders: "To this day, I don't know how I ended up in that pool, or making the picks. I must have filled it out and went to bed, and I didn't think about it again until that Monday call. He vaguely remembered getting an alert an hour before the tournament tipped off on Thursday.

He was barely functional that morning, so he thinks in the fog of being sick he must have responded, started a group, filled out a bracket and laid back down. Now, he was being told that one of the coolest moments of his life happened without him even knowing it. At the end of the call, Nigl began to realize the stakes of his unbelievable bracket.

He had the interview on speakerphone, so his wife listened in on the entire wild story and was as flummoxed as he was. To some extent, he was right. When the story was posted, Nigl's phone lit up with media inquiries. He spent the next two days doing a slew of interviews, including two that required him to drive down to Burlington on Tuesday morning with his family.

By the time the day was over, the whole Nigl crew found their heads spinning. Deep down, Nigl felt a little silly telling the whole story. He was being treated like an NCAA tournament guru, booking a trip to Anaheim for him and his 9-year-old son, Kaiden, because of his masterful prognostications They drove back to Killington that day knowing their vacation was over, and that a new trip was taking its place.

Nigl and his son bought some non-ski slope clothes to wear in California. They managed to squeeze in some snowboarding on Wednesday, but they needed to leave early Thursday morning to get to the airport. Halfway to the airport, Nigl realized he had forgotten his wallet. They turned around and rushed back to the lodge, but Nigl eventually found it in the car and they turned around for Burlington again.

He realized they probably weren't going to make it in time for the flight, so he called the airport to see if there was any way the plane could be held, even just for a few minutes. Nigl and Kaiden ran into the airport 10 minutes before his flight was supposed to take off.

The Burlington airport was indeed small, and they cleared security in four minutes. As improbable as his bracket was, making that flight felt like 1-in billion odds, too. They flew to Newark, New Jersey, and had some time to kill in the airport. Kaiden took a barrage of photos -- he has more than from that trip -- with the New York City skyline in the background.

They both got a good laugh when they saw Nigl's face on CNN as they hiked through the airport. Maybe he was famous, after all. In Anaheim, they had a blast. Wichita st vs florida atlantic prediction Everywhere Nigl went, his bracket came up in conversation. At the time, he was for and still going. As they sat down at their seats for the Michigan- Texas Tech game on Thursday night, he found out he'd hit his 49th straight game, Virginia over Oregon.

Right before his Wolverines took the floor, he saw on his phone that his run was in trouble. He'd picked No. Then Tennessee got hot, storming back to take a lead late in the second half. Game No. But the Boilermakers slowly pulled away in overtime as Nigl and his son followed along from their seats.

Final score: Purdue 99, Tennessee 94 in OT. The run was over at 49 straight picks. According to Jacobson, the chances of getting the first 49 games correct were somewhere around the same as winning the Powerball twice. From there, things got ugly for the Center Road bracket. Nigl missed on three of his eight Sweet 16 games, and only one of his Final Four picks ended up making it to Minneapolis.