Are you reading this before NCAA Tournament games start Thursday? Congratulations, you can count yourself among the many who have a perfect March Madness bracket.
If you’re reading this after Thursday, chances are you’re probably not in the perfect bracket camp. And depending on how late you’re reading this, odds are there aren’t any brackets that are left.
Filling out a perfect bracket ranks among the most statistically unlikely events to take place in one’s life. You’re more likely to win the lottery or get struck by lightning twice. If you filled out a bracket at random and someone placed it on a random square foot on the surface of the Earth, you’d have a better chance guessing the exact square foot your bracket is on than the chances every team predicted as a winner on that piece of paper win their games.
But maybe this will be the year. Perhaps someone has the right combination of skill and absurd luck to successfully predict every game correctly. More likely though, it won’t.
How many perfect brackets are currently left out there? Here’s a look at how they’re performing on the top bracket sites.
TSN’s MARCH MADNESS HQ:
Live NCAA bracket news | TV schedule | Predictor tool
Are there perfect March Madness brackets left in 2024?
There’s a whole bunch of perfect brackets still left. As long as you’ve filled one out, it’s perfect — for now.
ESPN
The tournament has not officially begun, so ESPN is currently reporting there are no imperfect brackets.
Yahoo
The tournament has not officially begun, so Yahoo is currently reporting there are no imperfect brackets.
CBS
The tournament has not officially begun, so CBS is currently reporting there are no imperfect brackets.
NCAA
The tournament has not officially begun, so the NCAA is currently reporting there are no imperfect brackets.
EXPERT PICKS: DeCourcy (UConn) | Bender (UConn) | Iyer (UConn) | Yanchulis (South Carolina women)
What percentage of brackets are still perfect?
That’s 100 percent as of Thursday morning. That’s also because brackets don’t count First Four games, meaning tracking will not be starting until games begin at 12:15 p.m. ET Thursday. About two hours later, it’s safe to assume the number is going to drastically dip from 100 percent.
Perfect March Madness bracket odds
The odds are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,80 for having a random bracket pick every game right. That number spelled out would nine quintillion, 223 quadrillion, 372 trillion, 36 billion, 854 million, 775 thousand, 808. If you have some basketball knowledge, your odds spike to a whopping 1 in 120.2 billion if you have basketball knowledge.
Worldometers tracks the current number of people on Earth at 8.1 billion. If everyone in the world had basketball knowledge — I highly doubt the newborns around the world are ready to guess whether Michigan State or Mississippi State will win the first round — they would need to fill out 15 brackets each to have a chance at getting a perfect one. Even then, they would all have to fill out unique brackets to really maximize the odds.
What is the longest a bracket stayed perfect?
Back in 2019, Columbus, Ohio, resident Gregg Nigl correctly predicted the first 49 games of the tournament. It wasn’t until No. 3 Purdue beat No. 2 Tennessee that Nigl’s bid for the first-ever perfect bracket went down.
Since then, no bracket has remained perfect after the first round.
