Year after year, the entire country gets excited for March Madness, and for great reasons. It is arguably the best time of the year in the world of sports, but each and every one of us fills out a March Madness bracket every year. Unfortunately, none of them are perfect.
Why the heck is picking the March Madness perfect bracket so hard?
Sixty-eight different NCAA basketball teams duke it out to determine the National Champion, but only one team walks away with the title. Picking the March Madness perfect bracket seems so easy, yet nobody has ever done it. Perhaps, this could be the year. Will you be the one to get it done? The math may not be on your side, but crazier things have happened.
Odds of a Perfect Bracket
You do not have to be a mathematician to understand this one; the NCAAB odds of obtaining a perfect bracket are 1 in 9,223,327,036,854,775,808. You have better luck buying a lottery ticket.
At the end of the day, who cares about the numbers? Let’s prove the naysayers wrong and make some history. Your March Madness picks may very well be the correct ones.
The Best of the Best
Over 20 million brackets are filled out every year, but the NCAAB schedule is still too daunting for the contestants. You could study all of the NCAA basketball teams all season long, yet you would still need a miraculous miracle to have a perfect bracket. History is made every year, but we may never see a perfect bracket.
The 2019 NCAA Tournament featured the best bracket in history. The longest verified streak of games picked correctly was 49. Although that number seems high, this only lasted until the Sweet 16. With all of the NCAAB picks you have to monitor, getting to the Sweet 16 is a major accomplishment in and of itself.
Better Luck Next Year
As much as I want to make history, it is very unlikely that it will happen. The talent in college basketball is insane. Gone are the days of the Blue Bloods walking over everyone; the mid-majors are the strongest they have ever been. This makes picking a March Madness perfect bracket the hardest it has ever been in the history of the sport.
Back in the day, the No. 1 or No. 2 seeds losing in the first round seemed farfetched, but that is no longer the case. You can no longer count out the underdogs, as they have some of the best college basketball players. More and more players like Max Abmas are creeping their heads into the tournament.
The most dangerous part of the tournament is that it is hard to scout these mid-major teams. Nobody knows anything about them, and they really have nothing to lose. Teams coming out of the Missouri Valley Conference or the Mountain West Conference, for example, have much less to worry about than teams from the Big 12.
On top of that, you have the college basketball injury report to deal with. It is one thing to win your group in the bracket challenge, but picking a perfect bracket will not happen.
Predicting the Upsets
Predicting the upsets based on the college basketball standings is one of the hardest things to do in all of sports betting. It is nearly impossible to do, but we can still look at some of the most likely upsets to take place.
Throughout the history of the NCAA Tournament, there is an average of 12.4 upsets per tournament. It is hard enough to pick upsets for NCAA basketball games today, but doing it on the biggest stage is even harder.
As the tournament progresses, upsets become a lot less frequent. During the first round, on average, there are 6.4 upsets. In the second round, there are 3.7 upsets. In the Sweet 16, Elite Eight, and Final Four, there are 1.7, 0.5, and 0.2 upsets on average, respectively. The most upsets in the history of the tournament took place in 2014, with 19 throughout March Madness when the UConn Huskies won it all.
The most common upsets in the tournament have taken place between the No. 10 and No. 7 seeds, with a frequency of 39.5%. The ten seed has won 57 different times. After that, the No. 11 vs No. 6 seed and No. 12 vs No. 5 seed also have a frequency of over 30%. The No. 16 team has only upset the No. 1 seed once, which occurred in 2018 when the UMBC Retrievers (25-10) defeated the Virginia Cavaliers 74-24 (31-3).
At the end of the day, picking the March Madness perfect bracket is nearly impossible. Just because it has not been achieved before does not mean that it will never happen. Let’s change history during the 2023 NCAA Tournament.
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