It is that time of year when 63 college basketball teams face off in the ultimate bracket to be crowned victorious, but there is another aspect that many people find intriguing. Some might even say this perspective is more important than the actual games, the perspective being the idea of a perfect bracket. With a total of 63 games and two possible outcomes, the chances every year of scoring a perfect bracket, getting all outcomes correct to the finals, is about 1 in 9.2 quintillion; you are more likely to get struck by lightning 10 times in your life by just pure randomness than getting a perfect March Madness bracket.
Picking a perfect bracket can be ridiculously complex; even if you were a massive college basketball fanatic and had done your research to the absolute breaking point, your chances would still be around 1 in 120 billion. Now imagine making brackets for both the male and female March Madness; at that point, it’s better to just blindly pick, hoping for the best.
A study by San Francisco State professor Paul Beckman examined every men’s and women’s NCAA tournament bracket since the year 2000, focusing on the seeding of ‘Sweet 16’ teams. His analysis revealed that while the women’s tournament tends to be slightly more predictable based on the variables and giving factors, the odds of selecting a perfect bracket are still low, roughly 1 in 100 billion. The men’s tournament, however, has shown extreme variation in outcomes from year to year. For instance, the combined seed totals of Sweet 16 teams shifted drastically, from 85 in 2018 to 49 in 2019 to 94 in 2020. Beckman’s research just goes to prove the unpredictability of the tournament and how its varying factors can lead to underperforming brackets, even with all the tools in hand.
In 2019, a neuropsychologist by the name of Gregg Nigl from the state of Ohio shattered the previous record of 39 games set in 2017 by picking the correct outcome of the first 49 games before meeting his inevitable fate in the 50th, where the third-ranked Purdue beat the second-ranked Tennessee in an overtime thriller.
Before the rise of digital tracking and online databases, keeping records of March Madness brackets was a tedious and error-prone process, relying on handwritten records, printed brackets, and manual calculations to track progression through the tournament, another major factor was that many were fake sites were you could change your outcomes halfway through the game, decreasing the validity and value of those brackets and thus creating more challenges for people to verify its legitimacy.
In a sense, getting a perfect March Madness bracket may never happen; most brackets don’t even make it out the first line of games, and the count just depletes as the tournament goes on, but you never know, a small chance is still better than no chance at all. What’s more probable is beating 49 games, but even that is still almost nearly impossible. Will this record stay on top, or will someone else dethrone the crown?
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