The odds of achieving a perfect bracket for the college basketball tournament are about 1 in 9.22 quintillion.
Topline
A sliver of bracket submissions for this year’s NCAA March Madness men’s tournament remained perfect Thursday night, during the first day of the college basketball competition, as entrants face near-impossible odds of perfectly predicting the outcomes of the tournament’s 63 games.Key Facts
The NCAA said Thursday evening that of the over 34 million brackets submitted at the start of March Madness, approximately 800,000 remained perfect.
No. 12 seed McNeese State University held on for a win against No. 5 seed Clemson University in a 69-67 nail-biter Thursday afternoon, in the biggest upset of the tournament thus far, reducing perfect brackets from 11 million at the start of the game to just under 2 million after the buzzer.
The first game of the tournament, Creighton University’s 89-75 win over the University of Louisville, busted over half of the brackets submitted to the NCAA.
About 540,000 brackets submitted with ESPN remained perfect after the tournament’s first eight games, a small fraction of the 24.
