The possibility of filling out a perfect March Madness bracket is 1 in 9.2 quintillion if you just guess or flip a coin, and 1 in 120.2 billion if you know a little something about basketball, according to the NCAA website.
In 2022, there were no perfect brackets on ESPN's Tournament Challenge bracket game after the first round, and only 13 of 17.36 million got 31 of the 32 games right. There were 12,529 brackets that correctly picked the Final Four, while 7.02% of brackets made the right call on Kansas winning the national championship.
Sixty-eight teams compete annually in the NCAA tournament.
Georgia Tech professor Joel Sokol, who has worked for years on a statistical model to predict college basketball games, says "in general, about 75 percent is where you'll get for essentially any model.
"Any of the best ones," Sokol said. "Which is partly what makes people think that about a quarter of tournament games are upsets. It might be a little higher or a little lower, but give or take, it's close to 75%, where the best models can pick out which teams are better than others, and then it's just a question of whether the ball bounces the right way, who is playing better that day, whatever, whether you get the upset that day or not.
"Even the most optimistic number I've seen, which is about 1 in 2 billion, that means give or take, if you want a 50-50 chance of ever seeing it in your life, you have to go through 1 billion NCAA tournaments. And you might say, Well there's millions of people filling these brackets out every year, but really there's not that much variation in the brackets, compared to how many there could be."
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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