This post was originally published on this site
Nobody’s perfect.
That’s especially true this year for March Madness — as of Sunday, there are zero perfect brackets left for either the men’s or women’s NCAA tournaments. That’s according to NCAA.com, which tracked some 20 million brackets submitted to its own site as well as ESPN, CBS Sports and Yahoo bracket challenges.
On the men’s side, the last perfect bracket went up in smoke on the tournament’s second day, thanks to a swarm of first-round upsets, including 15th-seed St. Peter’s shocking win over No. 2-seed Kentucky. After Thursday’s opening 16 games, there were just 192 perfect brackets remaining — that number dropped to just one perfect bracket after 26 games, and that one went down after 11th-seed Iowa State upset 6th-seed LSU on Friday night.
In 2019, an Ohio man somehow correctly picked the first 49 games of the men’s tournament, 10 games longer than the previous record run. The likelihood of a full 63-game tournament run is miniscule — about 1 in 9.2 quintillion, according to the NCAA. Last year, the last perfect bracket lasted 28 games.
Of the 1 million women’s brackets submitted this year, only three lasted past the first round, after a series of upsets by No. 10 South Dakota, No. 10 Creighton, No. 11 Princeton, No. 11 Villanova, No. 12 Belmont and No. 12 Florida Gulf Coast.
But those final three went down Sunday, with the last perfect bracket — which survived an impressive 35 games — busted after No. 2-seed Texas beat 7th-seeded Utah.
