- NCAA Women's March Madness Bracket and Schedule 2026: Dates, times, games, and standings in the NCAA tournament
- NCAA Men's March Madness Bracket and Schedule 2026: Dates, times, matchups, and standings in the NCAA tournament
Every year, NCAA college basketball fans frantically fill out their brackets in hopes of predicting who will take home the national title, and some look to do the impossible by accurately forecasting the entire field. But just how impossible is it?
Well, let's just say that CBB enthusiasts in search of a perfect bracket would be better served if they prioritized their time elsewhere, given the overwhelming odds.
NCAA says it's almost impossible to win
To begin with, let's acknowledge the fact that any brave soul looking to achieve the extravagant goal can only do so by predicting all 63 games of the tournament. To date, the closest anyone has come to the mark since the NCAA began tracking online brackets in 2016 was four years ago, when an Ohio man predicted the first 49 picks before his streak ended in the Sweet 16 in 2019.
As impressive as those 49 picks were, anyone looking to match or surpass that amount may feel a little disheartened to know they can't aim high enough to reach that threshold considering the numbers. According to the NCAA, the odds of completing a perfect bracket are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (or approximately 1 in 9.2 trillion).
For comparison, taking the time to make your picks would give you the same chance of hitting 63 of 63 as if you guessed or made your picks after flipping a coin. But don't worry, CBB fans: those odds actually drop to a slightly more "reasonable" 1 in 120.2 billion if, as the NCAA put it, "you know something about basketball".
NCAA with another example to better understand the big picture
The NCAA cited a 2012 study from the University of Hawaii that estimated there are 7.5 trillion grains of sand on Earth. If a person were given one of those grains and asked to guess which one had been chosen, the odds of getting it right would be "23 percent better than picking a perfect group by flipping a coin," according to the NCAA.
It goes without saying that the figures look daunting, no matter how you look at them, but there are likely to be more than a few fans entering the 2023 tournament looking to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, even if the odds are not exactly in their favor.