Creating March Madness brackets can be one of the most enjoyable experiences for a sports fan.
When the full slate of men’s and women’s NCAA tournament brackets is released on Selection Sunday, fans will rush to fill out their top picks of who will win each of the 63 games. Approximately 60 to 100 million brackets are filled out each season.
It’s nearly impossible to fill out a perfect bracket, especially with all the upsets that occur in the tournament every year. Not a single person in the history of the tournament has filled out a 100% correct March Madness bracket—at least since the results have been tracked and verified by the NCAA.
According to the NCAA, the closest any person has ever gotten to filling out a perfect bracket came in 2019, when an Ohio man got the first 49 picks correct. His streak was broken after the Sweet 16, which is the longest streak since the NCAA began tracking brackets online in 2016.
However, the NCAA admits that there could possibly have been a perfect bracket somewhere since 1985, when the NCAA men’s tournament grew to 64 teams. Many people fill out their brackets on paper or don’t document their picks on public domains, making it difficult to track those brackets.
Will this be the year someone fills out a perfect March Madness bracket, or even breaks the 2019 record of 49 correct picks in a row?
The men’s NCAA tournament begins in earnest on Thursday (after the First Four is contested on Tuesday and Wednesday), while the women’s NCAA tournament begins on Friday.
The odds of predicting all 63 games correctly to record a perfect bracket are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (or approximately 1 in 9.2 quintillion), according to NCAA.com.
