March Madness is the perfect postseason, but has (or will) anyone ever fill out a perfect bracket?

At some point between Selection Sunday and the start of the first round of the NCAA tournament on the subsequent Thursday, you’re probably going to fill out a bracket, step back, admire it and think to yourself, “This might be the one: the elusive, perfect March Madness bracket.”

Sorry to break the news to you like this, but…it ain’t happenin’.

By dinner time on Thursday on the East Coast, more than 99 percent of brackets will have gotten at least one pick wrong.

By the end of that first night, there may only be a few hundred entries left in the world that are a perfect 16-for-16.

And before the first round ends on Friday, chances are the dream of someone doing the impossible will already be dead, yet again.

But, you know, we’ll keep trying, right?

Before your next bracket ends up buried in the trash or burned at the stake, let’s take a look back on some of the best recorded efforts to fill out a perfect bracket for the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament.

Has There Ever Been a Perfect March Madness Bracket?

No, and there probably never will be, as the odds are quite literally astronomical.

We’ll get into the math shortly, but feel free to pause here, find yourself a quarter and try to flip heads 63 times in a row. You won’t make it very far, and that’s roughly what it would take to pick a perfect bracket.

Best March Madness Brackets on Record

With enough people flipping enough coins, you might think that someone would eventually come close, right?

After all, while your individual odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot on a single ticket purchase are outrageously low at 1 in 302 million, the odds of someone winning that lottery on any given day aren’t terrible.

However, the odds of picking a perfect bracket are even longer than your odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot on a single ticket purchase in consecutive drawings, so no one has actually gotten all that close.

The most famous bracket submission came in 2019, via Gregg Nigl of Columbus, Ohio.

In what was the only verified instance of a bracket surviving the first weekend of the NCAA tournament, Gregg started out a perfect 49-for-49 before Carsen Edwards and Purdue eliminated Tennessee (in overtime) in the Sweet 16 to hand Gregg his first L.

Ready for the funny part?

After achieving perfection through the first two rounds, Gregg only ended up getting one of the Final Four teams correct, his national championship pick of Gonzaga over Kentucky coming nowhere close to the actual title game of Virginia over Texas Tech.

That’s not meant as a knock on Gregg, either. It easily could have been a Gonzaga-Kentucky championship, and he’ll forever be a legend of luck for lasting as long as he did.

Rather, it’s a testament to the utter randomness of the NCAA tournament that a 49-for-49 start can unravel into a mess where there’s nothing left to root for in the Final Four.

The poor guy probably didn’t even win his office pool in the end.

Per NCAA.com’s Mike Benzie in an article from March 2024, there was not a single bracket that survived the first round in 2021, 2022, 2023 or 2024. And in the past 10 NCAA tournaments, Nigl’s run in 2019 is the only recorded case of a bracket making it through at least 40 games unscathed.

Fun fact: The second-best start of the past 10 tournaments was a 39-for-39 run in Yahoo’s bracket game in 2017. But as would happen to Nigl two years later, the dream of perfection for that bracket was also dashed by a Purdue victory.

Goodness knows a lot of brackets went up in smoke because of Purdue in 2023, too, when the No. 1 seed Boilermakers suffered that historic first-round loss to Fairleigh Dickinson. Clearly, Purdue exists solely to ruin brackets.

What are the Odds of a Perfect Bracket in March Madness?

We know by now that it hasn’t happened, but what are the mathematical odds that it could?

If we assume that every game is a 50/50 coin flip, the gigantic number you’ve possibly heard before for the odds of going a perfect 63-for-63 is 1-in-9.223 quintillion, which is 2 to the 63rd power.

For the record, it goes million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion on the large numbers naming scale, so nine quintillion would be a nine with 18 zeroes after it. Add on about another 223 quadrillion and there you have it.

But that’s assuming each game is a coin flip. Those are the odds of Kelly from HR picking a perfect bracket, having never watched a single college basketball game.

If you fancy yourself an expert on the sport, maybe for you it averages out closer to a 70/30 split on any given game.

What are those odds then?

They're still not great, which is why you almost never see any of the expert analysts on TV starting out a perfect 16-for-16.

Assuming a 70 percent likelihood of success on every pick, there’s only a 1-in-5.74 billion chance of perfection. That’s a number we can almost wrap our heads around, yet still appreciate how extremely long the odds are. (With 70 percent odds on each game, though, there’s a respectable 1-in-301 chance of finishing Day 1 at a perfect 16-for-16. So, there’s that.)

Of course, history suggests you’re probably better off not knowing much of anything about what you’re picking. The entrant who lasted the longest (34 picks) in ESPN’s bracket game in 2015 told Darren Rovell after making it through the first round without a miss, “I actually haven’t watched a full game this entire year.”

Has the Selection Committee Ever Been Perfect?

While we’re on the topic of best brackets, what’s the best the selection committee has done in the form of a chalk-filled bracket?

While the results of the NCAA tournament never validate or invalidate the job the committee did, it's still their job to select and seed the field, and we can sort of grade that job by how chaotic (or un-chaotic) the tournament ends up being.

Since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985, 2008 was the only time that all four No. 1 seeds made it to the Final Four. There was a considerable amount of upheaval in the early rounds of that tournament, though, including not one but two spots where a No. 12 seed faced a No. 13 seed in the second round, as well as No. 10 seed Davidson advancing all the way to the Elite Eight. Kansas won it all that year, but only after drawing the 16-8-12-10 seeds in its matchups through the first four rounds.

2000 was the tamest first round ever with only three first-round upsets — and minor ones at that, with two 10-over-7 victories and one instance of a No. 11 seed knocking off a No. 6 seed. However, all hell broke loose from there, with two No. 1 seeds and three No. 2 seeds losing in the second round, and No. 8 seeds North Carolina and Wisconsin both advancing to the Final Four.

The best of both worlds came in 2007.

Only two double-digit seeds made it out of the first round (both of them No. 11 seeds), and no one seeded below a No. 7 made it to the Sweet 16. From there, the Elite Eight was almost as chalky as possible, featuring four No. 1 seeds, three No. 2 seeds and a No. 3 seed. And the national championship ended up being No. 1 Florida over No. 1 Ohio State.

In just about every year, picking all the higher seeds to advance has been a great way to ensure you have no chance of winning your pool. But it might have worked in 2007.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the best March Madness bracket win anything?

You certainly can win something.

Warren Buffett used to offer a $1 billion prize to anyone who could fill out a perfect bracket. (Which never happened.)

ESPN typically awards $1,000 or $5,000 prizes to a lucky few in its pool of more than 20 million entries.

Your best bet, though, is playing in a small pool (with Sleeper Bracket Mania, obviously) in your office or dormitory, which, for legal purposes, definitely does NOT have a $5 or $10 entry fee for a winner-take-all grand prize.

What strategies can help improve my chances of creating an accurate bracket?

The only sound advice we can offer to this end is that if you want a legitimate chance of winning your pool, don’t go too crazy on the upsets.

Plant your flag in one or two wild spots if you want. After all, we have now seen a No. 16 seed upset a No. 1 seed multiple times in the history of the tournament.

However, a No. 16 seed has never made it to the Sweet 16, no one seeded lower than No. 11 has ever made it to the Final Four, and there has never been a double-digit seed in the national championship.

So, if you’ve got a 12 battling a 14 for all the marbles, you might as well just throw away your bracket now.

That said, the 2014 title game was a No. 7 vs. No. 8 showdown, and the 2023 Final Four featured a No. 4, two No. 5s and a No. 9 seed. It’s called March Madness for a reason.

Boost Your Fantasy Basketball Strategy with Sleeper!

When Selection Sunday rolls around in mid-March and you’re searching for the best place to host your bracket pool, look no further than Sleeper Bracket Mania.

You can have up to 10,000 participants in your bracket pool, or make it private and just keep it to a small group of friends. Either way, you can see throughout the tournament where your bracket ranks globally.

Shortly after the field is revealed, you’ll get to read little blurbs about each of the teams in the tournament, in case you need any stats, help or just the occasional chuckle while filling out your bracket.

Once the tournament has begun and entries are locked in, Sleeper takes care of marking all those winners and losers while you use the in-app chat for bragging rights and/or sob stories about where it all went wrong.

Of course, March Madness only encompasses a small fraction of the calendar, but Sleeper has you covered year-round with a multitude of fantasy offerings. If you can’t find something on there that you would enjoy as a sports fan, you probably didn’t look very hard.