March Madness bracket perfection ends as No. 6 Tennessee defeats No. 3 Virginia in Game 44, eliminating the final remaining flawless bracket from 36 million entries.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — And then there were none! Once again, there will not be a perfect March Madness bracket.
According to the NCAA, the lone remaining perfect bracket fell on Sunday evening when #6 Tennessee beat #3 Virginia.
The NCAA said ESPN user “chrisienter” had a perfect bracket through 43 games.
Users across ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, USA Today and Sports Illustrated filled out around 36 million brackets ahead of this year’s tournament.
According to NCAA.com, the longest perfect bracket ever was in 2019 and went all the way to 49-0 before missing a game.
After Thursday’s games, nearly 14,000 brackets remained perfect. That number dropped to 224 after Friday’s games. Only four brackets survived Saturday’s games and Sunday saw the last four fall.
All four brackets picked Purdue over Miami; only three had Iowa State over Kentucky. One had St. John’s upset over Kansas and in Game 44, no one had Tennessee over Virginia.
What’s the closest to a perfect March Madness bracket?
According to NCAA.com, the odds of picking a perfect bracket at random — not even counting the play-in games — is 1 chance out of 2 to the 63rd power, which is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or about 1 in 9.2 quintillion (give or take 20 quadrillion or so). According to University of Hawaii researchers, that is more brackets than the number of grains of sand on Earth.
However, NCAA.com also notes that the odds are more like 1 in 120.2 billion if the person making the bracket takes into account info about which teams are better and tournament history.