2025<\/p>\n
Men’s brackets remained perfect until No. 3 Kentucky topped No. 6 Illinois in the second round on game 43 on Sunday<\/a> \u2014 the best run since 2019. The last bracket, called “#RoadToPerfection<\/a>” was competing in ESPN’s game.<\/p>\n 2024<\/p>\n The last perfect men’s bracket almost made it through the first round, but No. 8 Utah State’s win against No. 9 TCU busted the last standing bracket on the 31st game of the tournament. The last bracket \u2014 named “Medalstick 84’s Picks 7<\/a>” \u2014 was in ESPN’s game.<\/p>\n 2023<\/p>\n The final verifiably perfect men\u2019s NCAA bracket busted in 2023 when No. 16 FDU stunned No. 1 Purdue \u2014 only the second time a 16 beat a 1 in men’s history. That came on the 25th game.<\/p>\n 2022<\/p>\n In 2022, all brackets busted on the first Friday of the tournament when No. 11 Iowa State upset No. 6 LSU, 59-54. That\u2019s when\u00a0this bracket created by ESPN user “Bekins24”\u00a0\u2014 busted.<\/p>\n 2021<\/p>\n In 2021, multiple monumental upsets had all of the remaining perfect brackets bust on the 28th\u00a0game<\/a>. That of course follows 2020, when COVID-19 forced the cancellation of the NCAA tournament.<\/p>\n 2019<\/p>\n Before the 2019 NCAA tournament, the longest streak of correct picks we had seen in a March Madness bracket was 39 games, achieved in 2017.<\/p>\n Then, Gregg Nigl shattered that record with his briefly famous “center road” bracket in the Capital One NCAA March Madness Bracket Challenge<\/a>, which correctly predicted the first 49 games of the 2019 tournament before busting in game 50, when No. 3 Purdue beat No. 2 Tennessee 99-94 in overtime of the second game in the Sweet 16.<\/p>\n Nigl, a neuropsychologist from Columbus, Ohio, became the first verified bracket ever to pick through to the Sweet 16 correctly.<\/p>\n With more than three decades of online and paper brackets to sift through (the current format has existed since 1985) and with somewhere between an estimated 60 million to 100 million brackets filled out every year, it’s very possible\u00a0that\u00a0someone, somewhere has done better. Determining an official record is made even more difficult by the fact that online games only recently have begun comprehensive record-keeping.<\/p>\n We’ve closely tracked about 20-to-25 million online brackets per year in major games since 2016 using public leaderboards in combination with direct reporting and information gathering with those games. Prior to 2016, we’ve relied on those games’ reports as well as online archives to get the best information available.<\/p>\n Until Nigl, we could find no verified brackets that have been perfect into the Sweet 16\u00a0at all. There was a widely reported instance of a bracket that was perfect through two rounds in 2010, but there was no way to verify the bracket\u2019s authenticity. It had been entered in an online game where picks could be altered between rounds according to a Deadspin report at the time<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here’s where we stood in each of the previous years:<\/p>\n 2018<\/p>\n No perfect NCAA bracket lasted through the first round on Friday night, thanks to the historic 16-1 upset of UMBC over Virginia<\/a>. Of the millions of brackets we tracked, 25 were perfect through the first 28 games of the tournament, but UMBC’s win in game No. 29 knocked all of them out.<\/p>\n 2017<\/p>\n We saw an incredible 39 games picked to start the tournament, a number that was the highest recorded until 2019.\u00a0The\u00a0record-setting bracket, entered in Yahoo\u2019s bracket game, was the only bracket to make it past 37 games unscathed, and managed to reach 39 straight correct picks before Iowa State fell short of a comeback against Purdue and handed the bracket its first loss of the tournament.<\/p>\n 2016<\/p>\n The longest anyone went this year was 25 games<\/a>.\u00a0With Stephen F. Austin’s win over West Virginia on Friday night, the last remaining perfect NCAA tournament bracket busted. A 15-2 upset (Middle Tennessee over Michigan State) made\u00a0this a tough year for brackets.<\/p>\n 2015<\/p>\n This was another top year, as one bracket\u00a0in the ESPN online bracket game picked the first 34 games correctly, according to a story by ESPN senior writer Darren Rovell<\/a>. ESPN said in 2016 that its 2015 bracket was the best start to a tournament it had on record in 18 years of its game.<\/p>\n 2014 (and before)<\/p>\n Before 2017, the longest perfect bracket streak tracked was 36, according to Yahoo! Sports. In 2014,\u00a0Brad Binder went 36 for 36 to start the tournament<\/a>. Yahoo! Sports reported\u00a0that Binder’s bracket was the only time it had a perfect bracket go into the second round in its 18-plus years of hosting a game<\/a><\/p>\n In 2019’s tournament, the relative predictability (top seeds winning)\u00a0of the event led to an abnormally high number of perfect brackets surviving the first round. We tracked an estimated 25 million brackets from the start, at six major online games, including the\u00a0Capital One March Madness Bracket Challenge<\/a>\u00a0here at NCAA.com. Of those, 15 were perfect after the first 32 games of the tournament.<\/p>\n Saturday trimmed that field a bit more, and in games on\u00a0NCAA.com,\u00a0CBS, ESPN, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated and Yahoo!, just two\u00a0March Madness brackets remained perfect through 40 games heading into Sunday \u2014 Nigl’s and a bracket at Yahoo.<\/p>\n The brackets disagreed on the fourth game of the day \u2014 Texas Tech-Buffalo. When Texas Tech won, that left\u00a0just Nigl’s “center road”\u00a0bracket as the only perfect March Madness bracket left. That bracket survived multiple scares Sunday, including the Tennessee overtime win and Duke’s escape over UCF.<\/p>\n And after a runaway Gonzaga victory to start the Sweet 16, the “center road” bracket suffered its first loss, as Purdue beat Tennessee 99-94 in overtime in the 50th game of the tournament. That run of 49 correct games will be very hard to top in the future.<\/p>\n The odds of a perfect 63-game NCAA bracket can be as high as 1 in 9.2 quintillion \u2014 though those are\u00a0the perfect bracket odds if every game was a 50-50 coin flip. If you take NCAA men’s basketball knowledge into the formula, the odds of picking a perfect a bracket can be as low as 1 in 28 billion, according to the late DePaul professor Jeff Bergen<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"Gregg](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Perfect-NCAA-bracket_0.jpg\")
\n Gregg Nigl’s 2019 NCAA bracket is perfect through the first two rounds.<\/p>\n