The question of who’s in and who’s out has been rendered academic. Now, all attention is focused on who will win.
With the field for the 2026 NCAA men’s basketball tournament now set, March Madness has officially begun. And like every year around this time, millions of people from coast to coast—pencils in hand—have begun the task of trying to predict the outcome of every game over the three-week contest, hoping they’ll become the first to ever pull off the feat.
Will one of the blue bloods of college basketball win it all this year? Will a dark horse emerge and make a Cinderella run to the Final Four? Or will the Miami Hurricanes basketball team, which advanced to the Final Four three years ago, catch lightning in a bottle again?
Many self-proclaimed basketball aficionados think they know. But in truth, you have a better chance of winning the Powerball lottery (1 in 292 million) than you do of achieving bracket perfection. That’s because the odds of filling out a perfect NCAA tournament bracket (63 games, excluding the First Four) are roughly 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
How is such an astronomical number arrived at? University of Miami professor of mathematics Chris Cosner explained it in a 2019 story on bracketology that appeared in News@TheU.
“In a single elimination tournament with 64 teams (not counting the four play-in games) there must be 63 teams that lose, so there must be 63 games,” he said. “If you are simply picking winners by guessing, like flipping a coin, then the probability of being right for any single game is one out of two. So, the probability of getting a perfect bracket is just one out of two raised to the 63rd power.”
Such methods, he noted, are used extensively in science, business, medicine, industry, and government, and they form the most basic foundations of statistics.
“Where things get interesting is when you are trying to raise your probability of picking winners from one out of two to, say, two out of three,” he said. “To do that, people have developed various ways of ranking teams. That involves taking data on things like wins versus losses, margins of victory in wins, and strength of schedule, and trying to do something like a statistical analysis of those that helps you pick winners. That’s where statistical methods and algorithms come into the picture.”
But if you’re thinking maybe, just maybe, this could be the year someone achieves perfection, think again.
The longest verifiable streak of correct picks for an NCAA tournament bracket to start the tournament is 49, a mark achieved in 2019. An Ohio man correctly predicted the entire 2019 NCAA tournament into the Sweet 16, an accomplishment not seen in years of tracking publicly verifiable online March Madness brackets at all major games, according to the NCAA.
Let the madness begin.
