Track how many perfect NCAA brackets are left in 2024
It's almost time to fill out your brackets.
Both the NCAA DI men's and women's basketball tournament brackets will be revealed this Sunday, March 17 (6 p.m. ET for the men on CBS and 8 p.m. ET for the women on ESPN). That gives fans a few days to make their picks.
We'll be tracking millions of brackets — right here — once the first round begins Thursday, March 21 for the men and Friday, March 22 for the women.
The ultimate bracket-picking goal is going 63 for 63, where you correctly pick the winner of every...single...game.
The odds of that happening are, well, not great. One in 9.2 quintillion, in fact.
But what has been the challenge?
We believe the record is 49, when Gregg Nigl of Columbus, Ohio, went 49 for 49 to start the 2019 men's tournament. That means Nigl picked every single game right through the first weekend, when only 16 teams remained. Only when Purdue beat Tennessee in the Sweet 16 did Nigl's run end.
Here are the last stands from other years:
2023
The perfect men's bracket went out early on Game 25 when No. 16 Fairleigh Dickinson stunned No. 1 Purdue, following 2018 UMBC as the only 16 seed to beat a No. 1 in men's tournament history. For women's, No. 8 Ole Miss' upset of No. 1 Stanford on the 40th game ended the run.
2022
The perfect men's brackets lasted to game No. 28, just like in 2021. No. 15 Saint Peter's upset No. 2 Kentucky, giving the tournament its second consecutive season of a 15-over-2 stunner. On the women's side, the ESPN bracket "Nathan B!!!" got the first 35 right but reached its end when No. 2 Texas beat No. 7 Utah.
2021
Perfect brackets lasted through 28 games, a much shorter run than in 2019 with Nigl's 49. No. 15 Oral Roberts' upset of No. 2 Ohio State decimated brackets, as did other upsets by No. 12 Oregon State and No. 13 North Texas. The remaining 100+ perfect brackets after the first day shrunk down from there, hitting zero when No. 10 Maryland beat No. 7 UConn.
2019
As mentioned above, we believe this year holds the current record of 49, lasting into the Sweet 16.
2018
No perfect NCAA bracket lasted through the first round on Friday night, thanks to the historic 16-1 upset of UMBC over Virginia. Of the millions of brackets we tracked, 25 were perfect through the first 28 games of the tournament, but UMBC's win in game No. 29 knocked all of them out.
2017
We saw an incredible 39 games picked to start the tournament, a number that was the highest recorded until 2019. The record-setting bracket, entered in Yahoo’s bracket game, was the only bracket to make it past 37 games unscathed, and managed to reach 39 straight correct picks before Iowa State fell short of a comeback against Purdue and handed the bracket its first loss of the tournament.
2016
The longest anyone went this year was 25 games. With Stephen F. Austin's win over West Virginia on Friday night, the last remaining perfect NCAA tournament bracket busted. A 15-2 upset (Middle Tennessee over Michigan State) made this a tough year for brackets.
2015
This was another top year, as one bracket in the ESPN online bracket game picked the first 34 games correctly, according to a story by ESPN senior writer Darren Rovell. ESPN said in 2016 that its 2015 bracket was the best start to a tournament it had on record in 18 years of its game.
2014 (and before)
Before 2017, the longest perfect bracket streak tracked was 36, according to Yahoo! Sports. In 2014, Brad Binder went 36 for 36 to start the tournament. Yahoo! Sports reported that Binder's bracket was the only time it had a perfect bracket go into the second round in its 18-plus years of hosting a game.
When brackets lock at the tip of the first Thursday game, millions of college basketball fans will be tracking their picks, hoping that 12-over-5 upset happens — or their favorite team goes on a run.
Inevitable as it is, that first wrong pick sure does sting, right? Well, don't worry. You're not alone. Odds are, no one will fill out a perfect bracket in the men's or women's games this year.
Here's the TL/DR version of the odds of a perfect NCAA bracket:
- 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (if you just guess or flip a coin)
- 1 in 120.2 billion (if you know a little something about basketball)
That number is 9.2 quintillion, by the way. That number is so large that it might help to put it in perspective.
- There are 31.6 million seconds in a year, so 9.2 quintillion seconds is a quick 292 billion years.
- There have been 5 trillion days since the Big Bang, so repeat the entire history of our universe 1.8 million times.
- The Earth’s circumference is approximately 1.58 billion inches, so you’d have to walk around the planet 5.8 billion times.
- As of 2015, the best estimates for the number of trees on the planet was three trillion. Imagine that there was one single acorn hidden in one of those three trillion trees, and you were tasked with finding it on the first guess. Your odds of success are approximately three million times greater than picking a perfect bracket.
Gigantic upsets meant an early end of tracking perfection across millions of online brackets in 2023.
In the men's tournament, No. 16 FDU pulled off the biggest shock that busted all brackets before the end of the first round on Friday. This was through tracking the action in the Men's Bracket Challenge Game on NCAA.com, ESPN, CBS and Yahoo.
Going into Day 2, we were in better position than the last two years, as there were 787 perfect brackets left, even with No. 13 Furman taking out No. 4 Virginia and No. 15 Princeton beating No. 2 Arizona. That 787 was much better than 2021 (121 remaining) and 2022 (192 remaining). However, FDU topping Purdue — only the second 16 to beat a 1 in men's tournament history — eliminated the final 26 perfect brackets on Game 25. We had all brackets bust on Game 28 in both 2021 and 2022.
On the women's side, we had a perfect bracket until Game 40 — better than 2022's run to the 36th game. No. 8 Ole Miss' upset of No. 1 Stanford ended 2023's tracking.
