March Madness is just around the corner, which means it’s almost time for work productivity to come to a screeching halt for the time-honored tradition of filling out, perfecting, and obsessing over our brackets. Of course, we’ll inevitably watch them go up in smoke before the early afternoon games are over on Thursday.
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When Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion wrote “The Impossible Dream” for the 1965 Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, they may have been dreaming of a perfect NCAA Tournament bracket. Only 25 teams participated back then compared to today’s 68, so they would have had a better chance at achieving perfection.
Taking out the First Four, which generally doesn’t need to be picked, aspiring dreamers still need to hit 63 games in a row to achieve the impossible.
Escaping just the tournament’s first weekend unscathed is nearly unheard of. That has happened only once since 2019, when Ohio neuropsychologist Gregg Nigl correctly picked the first 49 games for the longest verified perfect streak in NCAA Tournament history.
Nigl’s bracket crumbled when 3-seed Purdue beat 2-seed Tennessee in overtime (a matchup the Boilermakers also won last year, albeit in the Elite Eight), but he shattered the previous record of 39 straight wins to start the Big Dance. According to the NCAA, nobody has gotten past 30 since.
What are the odds of picking a perfect bracket?
If you assume that every outcome has a random 50-50 chance of happening, then the odds of picking a perfect bracket are about 1 in 9.2 quintillion. You know it’s a high number when the letter “q” gets involved. Adjust for favorites, and those odds drop to 1 in 120 billion.
Most people stick with the higher seed, so when a huge upset happens, it destroys millions of brackets at once. Take a year with multiple Cinderellas, and the odds grow exponentially, like when a 16-seed and a 15-seed both win, as Fairleigh Dickinson and Princeton did in 2023.
Warren Buffett, a man who knows his way around numbers, once offered $1 billion to anyone who could pick a perfect bracket. That should tell you how impossible it really is, as Buffett, a legendary investor, is not known for making bad bets.
If there’s one lesson to be learned in trying to pick a perfect bracket, it’s to beware of Purdue. Getting the Purdue game wrong cost Gregg Nigl his perfect bracket in 2019, just as it cost the previous record-holder perfection in 2017.
When the Boilermakers became only the second 1-seed to lose in the first round in 2023, no perfect brackets remained just 25 games in.
College basketball fans will make like Han Solo in a few weeks: “Never tell me the odds” (The Empire Strikes Back). We’ll all make our picks and hope this is the year we as a species finally make history. Someday, the impossible dream will be realized.
