There are 11 people whose NCAA Tournament brackets survived victories by long shots Yale, Oakland and Duquesne.
Florida Atlantic's loss to Northwestern knocked out about half of the perfect brackets that made it through Thursday's games, when only 1,825 survived in ESPN's Tournament Challenge. The eighth-seeded Wildcats were picked in about 45% of brackets that were still alive on Friday morning. It was down to 306 before No. 10 seed Colorado beat seventh-seeded Florida, leaving 62 perfect brackets. Yale's victory over Auburn left just 10.
There was one additional perfect bracket remaining on March Madness Live, the NCAA's official site, after Yale's win.
But the quest for a winless bracket ended Friday.
One person on the ESPN site made it through the first day and then some without picking a game correctly, meaning they took a flyer on No. 16 seed Wagner over top-seeded North Carolina but missed on the actual losses by third-seeded Kentucky and 6 seeds Texas Tech and Brigham Young. They dropped out of contention for the ignominious honor of a perfectly imperfect bracket when Colorado beat Florida 102-100 on a last-second shot.
The odds of picking a perfect bracket at random — not even counting the play-in games — is 1 chance out of 2 to the 63rd power, which is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or about 1 in 9.2 quintillion (give or take 20 quadrillion or so). According to University of Hawaii researchers, that is more brackets than the number of grains of sand on Earth.
A record 22 million brackets were filled out on ESPN’s site, up 15% over last year, with some of the early results knocking out millions. Mississippi State's 69-51 loss to Michigan State and Brigham Young's 71-67 loss to Duquesne each took out more than 9 million brackets. The biggest upset of the first day, third-seeded Kentucky's 80-76 loss to Oakland, also did some damage: The third-seeded Wildcats were picked in 95% of brackets in the ESPN Tournament Challenge to beat the 14th-seeded Golden Grizzlies.
CBS said its last perfect bracket was spoiled when Yale won.
Last year, when there were victories by No. 15 seed Princeton and No. 13 seed Furman on the first day, the last remaining perfect brackets fell on top-seeded Purdue's loss to Fairleigh Dickinson — just the second No. 16 seed to beat a No. 1 seed in tournament history.
In the women's tournament, which started on Friday, ESPN's bracket challenge had a record 3.25 million entries — 56% more than last year. Almost half, 1.5 million, went out on Middle Tennessee's victory over Louisville and 1.3 million others were taken out when Michigan State lost to North Carolina. Only 62,277 remained after Friday afternoon's results.
CBS also reported a record number of brackets for the women's tournament, a 126% increase over last year.
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AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness
