With March Madness officially in full swing, many are glued to the TV in hopes that their bracket will be the one to perfectly guess the tournament’s outcome. With the Purdue Boilermakers losing to the Farleigh Dickinson Knights on Friday March 13, plenty of NCAA fans are hanging up their pipe dreams of a perfect bracket for the time being.
This game has been a historic upset as FDU is the second 16 seed school to beat a 1 seed school in the history of the NCAA, with the first team being the University of Maryland-Baltimore when they beat the Virginia Cavaliers in 2018. Upsets like this game are a perfect example of how unpredictable March Madness can be.
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This February was spent by many basketball enthusiasts putting excruciating thought into their perfect bracket. While it’s fun to think about being the one person to guess the tournament correctly, the question stands of how realistic this goal is. Because every team differentiates in terms of skill level, it’s easy to think that the outcome of a game is predictable. However, there is still an element of chance in every single game.
The statistical odds of the fabled “perfect bracket” are so high that nobody has ever written a successful bracket to this date. The closest that anyone has ever gotten to a perfect bracket was in 2019, when an Ohio man correctly guessed every match up until the sweet 16. According to the NCAA, anyone who fills out a bracket will have a 1 in 9.2 quintillion chance of correctly guessing 63 consecutive games.
While the chances are slim that anyone’s bracket will make it through to the final four without any mistakes, the fun of March Madness comes from seeing how close a bracket will make it before it all falls apart in an evening.
Chris Scharf
Reporter