What are the odds of picking a perfect March Madness bracket?

A March Madness basketball. (Shuttlestock)

March 11th, 2022

Every time I hear someone say "nothing is impossible," I want to ask them to prove it by picking a perfect NCAA March Madness bracket. It might be the most impossible feat in the world to achieve, which is why there has yet to be a single instance of it being accomplished.

Odds of:

Rolling 2 Sixes
1 : 35
Hole in One
1 : 5,000
Bowling 300
1 : 11,500
Throwing Perfect Game
1 : 46,800
Getting Royal Flush
1 : 649,000
Winning Gold Medal
1 : 3,500,000
Winning PowerBall
1 : 292,201,338
Making Perfect Bracket
1 : 9,223,372,036,854,775,808#MarchMadness https://t.co/otYgLk64pt
— Kyle Umlang (@kyleumlang) March 3, 2021

How difficult is it? An exact number is hard to produce, due to the quality of teams being different in each tournament. However, statisticians have estimated that the odds are approximately one in 9.2 quintillion. A quintillion is a number with 18 zeroes, and nine quintillion is a number so large that if you counted it out, one number per second, it would take 292 billion years to reach the end. That is nearly twice the length of time since the Big Bang!

Some statisticians have stated that the number is closer to one in 120 billion, if you are very knowledgeable about the teams in the tournament. That number is also reached by the thought that some games—such as the No. 1 seed against the No. 16 seed—have a near 100% chance of ending with only one result.

Regardless of the number, it’s nearly impossible. However, that has yet to stop people from trying to achieve the ultimate dream of correctly picking 63 games without a miss (not counting the "First Four" games). Numerous websites offer massive prizes if someone can do it, and that’s not including the $1 billion prize formerly offered up by Warren Buffett.

March Madness: Warren Buffett will pay $1 million a year for life to employees who get the Sweet 16 right https://t.co/3JiN4DwRpF pic.twitter.com/Nh7t0cCqfF
— Forbes (@Forbes) February 28, 2017

Has anybody even come close?

Even getting to the Sweet 16 without a mistake is close to impossible. In 2019, Buffett offered his Berkshire Hathaway employees a whopping prize of $1 million per year, for life, to anyone who picked the first 48 games correctly. The odds of achieving this milestone, if every game had a 50/50 shot, would be one in 281 trillion.

To show how difficult the "perfect bracket" truly is, only one person has ever officially had a perfect run through the first two rounds of the tournament. In 2019, Gregg Nigl of Columbus, OH became the record-holder for the most correct picks to start a bracket, as he accurately picked every game of the first weekend. His record of 49 correct selections came to an end in the second game of the Sweet 16, when Purdue upset Tennessee in overtime.

He would lose twice that night, and as if to further prove how tough it is to achieve perfection, Nigl correctly chose just one of the Final Four teams. For all his success, Nigl failed to even finish in the top 500 of the ESPN bracket challenge with his best of four entries.

Somehow, someway, Gregg Nigl's bracket remains perfect. pic.twitter.com/gu8Hm4mff5
— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) March 29, 2019

Whose record did Nigl break?

Tracking for a perfect bracket began less than 10 years ago, and before 2019, only a handful of entries had gotten the entire first round exactly right. Prior to Nigl, the best run to start the tournament was 39 games in 2017, 10 fewer than his record-setting bracket. The owner of that bracket, who entered the Yahoo! game, is unknown.

That year, a stunning 36 entries actually had the first round perfectly selected. However, his entry was the best run in Yahoo’s first 19 years of running the bracket challenge. The team that ended that run was – coincidentally – Purdue, who defeated Iowa State to end the run to perfection. Maybe don’t bet against Purdue if you want a perfect bracket?

The best start before this was in 2014, when Brad Binder picked the first 36 games correctly in his bracket. Before the 2017 tournament, Yahoo! said it was the only bracket in their history to roll through the first round undefeated.

College Basketball

What are the odds of picking a perfect March Madness bracket?

Has anybody even come close?

Whose record did Nigl break?

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