The odds of picking a perfect bracket at random are 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.
WASHINGTON — The 2026 March Madness tournament got underway on Thursday, and that means one thing. Busted brackets.
According to the NCAA, there are an estimated 36 million online brackets taking part in challenge games between ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, USA Today and Sports Illustrated.
How many perfect brackets are left?
As 9:48 p.m. ET, less than 30,00 brackets remained unblemished.
Last year, roughly 36,000 brackets survived the first day.
Millions of brackets didn’t even make it past the first game in 2026. According to the NCAA, more than half of the over 30 million brackets were eliminated when #9 TCU beat #8 Ohio State.
Later in the day, we had our first big upset when #12 High Point knocked off #5 Wisconsin. That left only 2.4 million perfect brackets out of the 36 million brackets that started.
Just five games into the 2026 tournament, the NCAA said only 3.2 million brackets remained perfect.
Vanderbilt’s victory over McNeese St. dropped the number of perfect brackets to 855,000.
On Thursday night, VCU took down No. 6 North Carolina in the first overtime game of March Madness. After that game, more than 400,000 perfect brackets were eliminated.
Two more upsets late Thursday knocked down hundreds of thousands of brackets. There were still four games to go on Thursday.