Has there ever been a perfect March Madness bracket?
March Madness is unpredictable. Seriously – it has never been correctly predicted.
Millions of college basketball fans fill in NCAA Tournament brackets each year with hopes of putting together the best one. However, while many can correctly pick a champion and certain upsets, there is still a chase for an elusive, perfect bracket.
In 2025, the final perfect bracket submitted to a major online bracket game for the men’s tournament was busted in the 43rd contest, a No. 3 Kentucky win over No. 6 Illinois in the second round. For the women’s tournament, one bracket made it all the way into the Elite Eight, going strong for 57 straight games before No. 1 UCLA defeated No. 3 LSU.
With 2026 March Madness upon us, let’s look at just how difficult it is to create a flawless bracket:
Has there ever been a perfect NCAA Tournament bracket?
There has never been a verified perfect bracket, according to the NCAA. The organization has been tracking online submissions across platforms since 2016 and used archival data before that.
Now, someone could have jotted down a perfect bracket over the years. In all likelihood, if that person said they did it, they were almost certainly lying.
What is the longest an NCAA Tournament bracket has been perfect?
Greg Nigl of Columbus, Ohio, set the men’s NCAA Tournament bracket record in 2019. He correctly predicted the winner of the first 49 games, breaking the previous record of 39 set in 2017 and becoming the first person to carry a perfect men’s bracket past the second round.
Nigl’s luck came to an end in the 50th contest of the 2019 tournament. No. 2 Tennessee almost kept his streak alive in the second game of the Sweet 16, but the Volunteers fell to No. 3 Purdue in overtime.
The longest streak for the women’s tournament came in 2025 when an ESPN Women’s Tournament Challenge user started out 57-0. The user, LisaVT22, only got two games wrong the entire tournament: UCLA’s Elite Eight win over LSU and UConn’s national championship game win over South Carolina.
What are the odds of predicting a perfect bracket?
Astronomically small.
The odds for a perfect bracket are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, which is 2 to the 63rd power.
That number is purely mathematical, though. With knowledge of the sport, like knowing the overwhelming likelihood that No. 1 seeds will beat No. 16 seeds in the first round, the number decreases a bit. Even then, there could be a Fairleigh Dickinson or UMBC lurking to put a blemish on people’s brackets.
The probability could also be even larger if every tournament game was included. Bracket submissions begin with the first round and do not include First Four games. If those were in the mix, the odds of a perfect bracket would become 1 in 147,573,952,589,676,412,928.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article was published in March 2023.
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