Achi news desk-
Just one day into this year’s March Madness tournament, a handful of upsets are breaking hearts and shattering brackets.
Thursday saw several top-seeded teams knocked off, as Kentucky, South Carolina and BYU each received first-round exits.
“It definitely eliminated a lot of people’s brackets,” said Isaac White, a fan in Waterloo.
The sports network ESPN collected 22.6 million brackets by Thursday tip. Entering Friday, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reported that only .00038 percent of the brackets submitted to it remain perfect.
“It’s outstanding to me,” White said. “I find it very unreal that it is so difficult to choose a perfect bracket.”
Why is March Madness so hard to predict?
The NCAA claims there is a 1 in 9.2 five million chance of predicting a flawless bracket just by randomly guessing each game.
“It is estimated that there are about … 7.5 five million grains of sand on the planet. So 1 in 9.2? That’s bigger than grains of sand,” said Michael Wallace, associate professor of biostatistics at the University of Waterloo.
Wallace says rough estimates suggest you’d be more likely to win the Lotto Max Ontario jackpot, die from a shark attack and be struck by lightning at the same time than to perfectly predict all 63 NCAA tournament games.
“About one in four games are upsets and if one in four games are upsets and you’re trying to predict a 63-game tournament, even the best maths in the world isn’t going to get you there,” Wallace explains.
Has anyone had a perfect March Madness bracket?
No, but just a few years ago, a neuropsychologist from Columbus, Ohio came close. In 2019, Gregg Nigl posted the longest streak in verified history. Nigl correctly predicted the first 49 games of that year’s tournament, until Purdue’s overtime win over Tennessee upset his bracket in game 50.
No one has ever predicted a perfect NCAA-validated bracket, and it’s a trend that isn’t likely to change in our lifetime.
While most fans agree, even with near-impossible odds, you can never say never.
