Under the current 68-team format, the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament has 63 games. Filling out a tournament bracket and predicting the winners would require beating odds that range between 1 in 28 billion and 1 in 9.2 quintillion. That’s an immense variance, of course. The larger number reflects retreating each game as a 50-50 coin flip, which simply is not the case. After all, a 16-seed taking on a 1-seed is not a 50-50 proposition. Jeff Bergen, a late professor at DePaul University, argued that if you take knowledge of the sport into account, your odds can drop as “low” as 1 in 28 billion. Each year, filling out brackets is one of the nation’s biggest college basketball betting pastimes. Let’s take a closer look at just how close people have actually come to the perfect bracket.
NCAA Bracketology: What Are the Odds of Picking a Perfect March Madness Bracket?
What is the longest streak of wins picked in a bracket?
The NCAA ran a study of verifiable brackets (those posted online or verified through other means), and the longest streak of correct picks is 49 and dates back to 2019. A man from Ohio made correct picks all the way into the Sweet Sixteen that year.
That man was Gregg Nigl, who filled out his bracket in the Capital One NCAA March Madness Bracket Challenge. He made it all the easy to the second game of the Sweet Sixteen, when 3-seed Purdue took down 2-seed Tennessee, 99-94, in overtime.
What was the longest streak in recent years?
Last year, it only took three days to break the last verifiable bracket, on the tournament’s first Friday. Once 11-seed Iowa State took down 6-seed LSU, 59-54, ESPN user “Bekins24” had his bracket busted.
In 2021, the tournament was also marked by multiple huge upsets, and it only took 28 total games for the last bracket to be busted. In 2020, of course, there was no tournament due to the outbreak of COVID-19.
Before 2019, the longest correct pick streak took place in 2017, when one bettor made it through 39 games.
The current tournament format has been in place since 1985, and between 60 million and 100 million brackets are estimated to be filled out each year, so it’s possible that some have gone even further. Even the online games have just recently started to keep thorough records, so what we have historically is incomplete.
In 2018, Maryland-Baltimore County became the first 16-seed ever to knock off a 1-seed when they toppled Virginia. That ended the run of brackets on the first Friday of the tournament. That was the 29th game and ended the streak for the remaining 25 verifiable brackets that had picked the first 28 correctly.
In 2016, the longest streak was 25 games, and it came to an end when Stephen F. Austin upset West Virginia on the first Friday of the tournament. Many brackets had fallen by the wayside when 15-seed Middle Tennessee State knocked off 2-seed Michigan State earlier in the first round.
In 2015, a bracket in the ESPN online game lasted 34 games; at the time, ESPN reported that this was the best results from any bracket in their online games in the previous 18 years in which they had offered the contest.
In 2014, Brad Binder picked the first 36 games correctly in a bracket with Yahoo! Sports. At the time, Yahoo! Reported that his bracket was the first perfect set of picks lasting into the second round in their 18 years of hosting the contest online.
If you’re wondering if it’s possible to beat the odds with sheer volume, Professor Bergen estimated that if each of the 7.5 billion people on Earth started filling out brackets and completed one per minute, it would take more than 2,000 years to complete the 9.2 quintillion that would cover every complete scenario.
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