According the NCAA, every year between 60 million and 100 million NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament brackets are filled out. Every single person who does it, be it for gambling reasons or pure fun, entertains the thought (however fleetingly) that they might be the one to correctly predict all 63 games.
Not to be the bearer of bad news but that is never going to happen. There's a better chance of getting back together with Taylor Swift. There's a better chance of winning the Powerball twice in one year. There's even a better chance of being struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark.
Actually ...
"You'd probably have a better chance of getting attacked by a shark in the desert," says Chris O'Byrne, a statistics lecturer at the Fowler School of Business at San Diego State University.
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The chances of filling out a perfect bracket are so miniscule, there are a few different ways to try and wrap your brain around it.
"People understand money, so I took dollar bills," says O'Byrne. "If you could take each bracket and it's the size of a dollar bill, and you were to stack all the possible brackets there are, that would be close to 54,000 round trips to the sun."
The earth and sun are separated by about 92.5 million miles, so, yeah, that's a lot of brackets. Plus, it's a huge waste of paper. The U.S. Census Bureau's population clock has a little more than eight billion people currently calling the Earth home. So, what if we all chipped in and tried to achieve perfection? How many unique brackets would we all have to fill out?
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"Eighteen billion per person in the world," says O'Byrne. "That's actually another way of thinking about it. That's what everybody would be responsible for and that would quantify all the different brackets."
Computers! AI! Could we get a program to fill out enough brackets to cover our bases and achieve the flawless field?
"Each year, you see more and more along those lines and you have people running the simulations and stuff of that nature and trying to pick that perfect bracket, but even in that case, those simulations are not going to cover every little scenario or event that can happen," says O'Byrne.
And even if the simulations could predict injury or bad bounces or terrible officiating, the computers would not have enough time. If a new bracket was produced every second covering all the possible outcomes, that would take how long, exactly?
O'Byrne says 4.7 billion millennia. That's 4.7 trillion years, or slightly longer than the four days between Selection Sunday and the 1st round.
Since 1985, when the March Madness field expanded to 64 teams, the longest any verified bracket has stayed perfect is 49 games. That came in 2019 when a neuropsychologist named Gregg Nigl got through 49 picks before getting one wrong (#2 seed Tennessee lost to #3 seed Purdue in the Sweet 16, in overtime). That's the only one that can be proven accurate through the first two rounds.
And it was still 14 shy of perfection.
Now, one thing that needs to be considered is luck. There's no way to know which one of the billions of thousands of brackets produced would land on the magical combination. It could be the last one. It could be the first one. The point of this to say if you don't get them all right, don't feel bad. You're definitely not alone.
