NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — The NCAA started out with 68 teams this March Madness after tonight's games we'll be down to just eight.
There's a lot of numbers and math that go into this tournament, especially when it comes to picking the perfect bracket.
Math does play a part when you factor in season play, injuries and those sorts of elements. But I was told even those models aren't perfect and get an accuracy rate of something like 75%
So, has anyone ever had a perfect bracket?
“No one's had a perfect bracket,” said Brandon Banes, an assistant math professor at Lipscomb University.
According to the NCAA, the longest verifiable streak of correct picks in an NCAA tournament bracket to start the March Madness tournament is 49, a mark that was established in 2019.
An Ohio man correctly predicted the entire 2019 NCAA tournament into the Sweet 16, something we've not seen in years of tracking publicly verifiable online March Madness brackets at all major games.
So, is there a chance someone in this world can have a perfect bracket? Yes, there's a chance but here are your odds, according to Banes.
“There's some people who have kind of used historical like bracket accuracy. If you do that, you get about a two-thirds accuracy rate. And when you redo the calculation with that, the odds are still one in 120.2 billion. So, it's just really hard to get a perfect bracket.”
If you fill out your bracket like a coin flip, the odds are one in 9.2 quintillion. To put it in perspective, that's 18 zeros if you write out a quintillion.
“The U.S. population is roughly a third of a billion, so we would need everybody to make three to get to a billion and then do that billion more times to get to a quintillion. And then you have to do that nine more times to get to nine quintillion,” said Banes.
Banes said that means every person in the country will need to fill out 27 billion brackets so we can read the odds of getting that perfect bracket.
Your chances will increase though with more knowledge of the current teams, the tournament’s history and an understanding of the sport itself.
However, Banes said we have a better chance in winning the lottery.
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-Rebecca Schleicher
