Has anyone gotten a perfect march madness bracket
perfect NCAA bracket is about as close to impossible as a task can get. According to Mike Benzie of bravadoaustralia.com.au, the closest anyone has gotten in. #1, One in nine quintillion chances. If you're trying to guess or flip a coin to craft a perfect March Madness bracket, there's one in. However, as Buffett doubtless knew, the odds of picking a perfect bracket are has anyone gotten a perfect march madness bracket small. Key Takeaways. Every year, sports fans participate in March. Nobody has officially achieved a perfect bracket in the March Madness basketball tournament. The odds of correctly guessing every game in a team tournament.
Only 0.001% Of March Madness Brackets Still Perfect Two Days Into NCAA Tournament
What are the odds of filling out a perfect NCAA tournament bracket? The odds of filling out a perfect bracket are one in 9.2 quintillion. Written out, that's 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. CHARLOTTE, N.C. — March Madness is officially here.
How many perfect brackets are left after kentucky loss? Kentucky's loss to Oakland later wiped out all but about 20,000 brackets. By the end of the tournament's first day, just 1,825 brackets remained intact — accounting for 0.008% of all brackets.
Has there been a 1 16 upset? Top seeds own a 154-2 all-time record against 16 seeds. FDU vs. Purdue in 2023 was only the second time the upset has happened. That means 16 seeds have a 1.28 winning percentage against 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament. No game had been decided by one possession since 1996 (Purdue beat Western Carolina, 73-71).
Has there ever been a perfect NCAA tournament bracket? No, but a neurologist from Columbus, Ohio, named Gregg Nigl had the verified bracket closest to perfection. Back in 2019, he correctly guessed the first 49 games of the men's tournament until then-No. 3 ranked Purdue defeated No. 2 Tennessee in the Sweet 16 — ending his bid for perfection.
How many possible outcomes are there for March Madness? 9,223,372,036,854,775,808: The number of different possible bracket outcomes. Wondering how to pronounce that number?
How one fan came close to a perfect March Madness bracket
The opening games pit seeds against their numerical opposites. For example, the first-seeded team plays the 16th seed; the second seed plays the 15th seed; and so forth. The table below outlines the odds of guessing all games correctly through each round assuming a team format in which each play-in game is predicted. In some tournaments, the four play-in games may or may not count toward crafting a perfect bracket.
Participants may not be required to submit their brackets until Thursday morning—the full first round of game play begins that afternoon. The good news is this means fewer games to predict; the bad news is there are still very long odds. Running with the same mathematical assumptions as above, the task is to guess 63 games correctly. This results in a one-in On the plus side, there's a one-in The tournament takes place over 63 games, plus four play-in games.
The odds of scoring a perfect bracket across 67 games are about one in The odds of a perfect bracket across 63 games are roughly one in more than 9 quintillion. It is overwhelmingly unlikely that anyone will create a perfect bracket. No one has ever accurately guessed all games in a March Madness bracket.
The closest brackets were in , when one person accurately guessed the first 49 games in a row. Before that, in , one person accurately guessed 39 consecutive games. In , the neuropsychologist was the first person to reach the Sweet 16, eventually breaking the streak in its second game when two-seed Tennessee lost to three-seed Purdue.
No one has yet claimed the prize, although some employees with relatively high-scoring brackets have taken home some consolation cash for their efforts. National Collegiate Athletic Association. American Gaming Association. Omaha World-Herald. New York Post. Has anyone gotten a perfect march madness bracket Action Network. National Council on Problem Gambling. American Psychiatric Association. National College Athletic Association.
Table of Contents Expand. Table of Contents. Odds of Winning. Partially-Perfect Odds. Odds for a Team Bracket. The Bottom Line. Business Leaders Warren Buffett. 
Trending Videos. Key Takeaways Every year, sports fans participate in March Madness bracket challenges, where they attempt to predict the winning teams in the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
The odds of correctly choosing the winners of all 67 games inclusive of play-in games are about one in His car's SiriusXM radio was locked and loaded with a cluster of hoops stations. He'd listen to the first batch of games that day and find a sports bar in Pennsylvania where they could stop and have a late dinner that would perfectly coincide with tip-off for his beloved Michigan Wolverines in their second-round matchup.
After the game, they'd drive a little more that evening, crash at a hotel, then finish the trip the following day as he listened to the final portion of the Round of 32 games. Hopefully, he'd be lying down at the ski lodge as he watched his least-favorite team, the seed Ohio State, lose that Sunday night.
Then, they would have five awesome days on the slopes of Killington, Vermont. What a plan. But, as the old saying goes, we make plans and God laughs. In this case, unbeknownst to Nigl, his entire vacation was about to implode because of all those college basketball games that would help him get his family to Vermont.
Nigl is one of those modest quiet people who is brilliant but would never say that. He's 45 and has worked as a neuropsychologist for the VA in Columbus since , helping vets manage dementia, memory loss and other cognitive issues. He is meticulous, and when he says something, it automatically feels considered and wise.
In the annals of mapping out family vacations, the scale would range from Clark Griswold at the low end to Gregg Nigl as the best-case scenario. On the drive, he figured he would keep loose tabs on how his brackets were making out. Nigl always filled out a few men's brackets, deploying the same basic philosophy that so many people use -- a little strategy, a little eye test, a little wishful thinking.
For his brackets, he went heavy on his favorite team Michigan and his favorite conference the Big Ten, except for Ohio State. He had always liked Gonzaga and hoped the school would win a title sometime, so he rode the No. He even sprinkled in the time-honored tradition of picking a random school he had a loose tie to; in this case, he knew someone who lived near the UC-Irvine campus, so he went with the seed Anteaters to upset Big 12 champ Kansas State in the first round.
But on the Thursday the tournament began, two days before they were supposed to leave for Vermont, Nigl was a mess. He called off work because he was so sick, and he hoped to watch every game as he lay on the couch and tried to recuperate for the long trip. This was not a part of his plan.
He was so sick, though, that he never even turned on the TV that Thursday. He eventually saw that Gonzaga won by almost 40, that the Big Ten went and that UC Irvine did indeed spring a big upset. He had a feeling that he was doing pretty well but didn't check his brackets. On Friday, he felt a little better and managed to watch a few games, including Michigan's win over Florida.
But as he got in the car on Saturday morning, still a little under the weather, he had no idea the reality of his situation: He was well on his way to having built the best NCAA men's bracket ever assembled -- one that he didn't even remember filling out. The possibility of getting every game right is often reported as 1 in 9. But that figure is slightly hyperbolic. It's computed by assuming all 63 games are coin flips, when, in reality, quite a few NCAA games have much higher percentages in favor of one team.
The actual odds of a knowledgeable person picking a perfect men's bracket are closer to 1 in billion. And guess what. It's not getting any easier. Despite advances in analytics, accessibility of watching games and more experts than ever, the variance of men's college hoops has never been higher. The rise of the 3-point shot has played a huge part, for sure, but so has the transfer portal and NIL.
A seed has won in the first round three straight years, a first in NCAA tournament history. And last year's men's tournament featured a Final Four of no 1, 2 or 3 seeds, which hadn't happened before. San Francisco State professor Paul Beckman did a study of every men's and women's bracket since , primarily relying upon seeding of teams that made it to the Sweet He found the women's tournament to be slightly more predictable the odds of picking a perfect women's bracket are still something like 1 in billion and that the men's tournament has been wildly variable, even from year to year.
For example, from , the men's tournament Sweet 16 team total seeds went from 85 to 49 to Even the predictability of the tournament is unpredictable, let alone picking individual games. Spence vs crawford ofds Yet we can't stop trying. 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.
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. Has anyone gotten a perfect march madness bracket When did he fill out an NCAA. Why was the pool named Center Road. Why was he the only one in the group?