As the month of March comes to a close, the sports world turns their eye’s to one event– March Madness. The most thrilling tournament in sports, 64 basketball teams fight to be crowned as this year’s national championship. Throughout the years, teams like Duke and UCLA have dominated along with the occasional underdogs like Loyola Chicago or George Mason. The unpredictability of the tournament creates the impossible challenge of picking a perfect bracket.
The NCAA says the odds of getting every pick correct are 1 in 220 billion, and even that’s with having some knowledge of the sport. To date, the longest perfect bracket survived 49 games, with a man from Ohio correctly predicting each Sweet 16 team in 2019. The possibility that we will see a perfect bracket in our lifetime is slim to none, so this year I am attempting a different challenge–an imperfect bracket.
Throughout the tournament, ESPN posts notifications of how many perfect brackets remain. Most ignore this update as their bracket has already busted, but I noticed that they add additional information of how many brackets have yet to predict a game correctly. This figure is normally extremely low as nobody is crazy enough to pick a 16-seed to beat the 1 seed.
Since I know there is no way for my bracket to be perfect, I am trying to attain glory through being completely wrong. Knowing what teams will pull off upsets is nearly impossible but I am confident I have made the right choices.
Starting off my quest for perfect imperfection, I predicted every 1-4 seed to lose, something that has never happened and statistically will never. As the bracket reached a closer-seeded matchup, the choices became extremely difficult. Although the 5 vs. 12 seed matchup is my highest-picked upset, I decided to take the risk and pick each 5 seed to win. Although it is common to see a 5 seed lose, I have a gut feeling that this year will be an anomaly.
The next group of matchups were even harder to predict. For the 6 vs. 11 matchup, I picked the 11 seed to win in 3 of the 4 matches. I have a strong feeling that VCU will beat BYU. Over the last 4 years, BYU consistently busts my bracket by losing in an earlier round. BYU this year has done nothing to fix my confidence in them.
For the 7-10 matchup, I predicted two upsets. For Kansas vs. Arkansas, I have Arkansas winning. Kansas this year has proven to be a weak team, focusing their offense through veteran center Hunter Dickinson, someone who has significantly fallen off in skill. Arkansas has had an extremely solid year, staying competitive in one of the strongest SEC years. For Utah State vs. UCLA, I made this pick completely off of vibes. Something in me strongly believes that UCLA will manage to let this game slip and keep my imperfect bracket imperfect. For the other two 7-10 matches, I gave the win to the higher seed because both 7 seeds, St. Mary’s and Marquette, are too strong of teams to lose these.
By far the hardest matchup to predict was the 8-9, with each of my picks being completely off a gut feeling. Statistically each of the teams in these matchup are the same, causing these games to bust the most brackets. After spending hours thinking about which team is going to lose (and using a coin flip or two), I selected Creighton, Baylor, UConn, and Georgia. If any of my picks are going to ruin this attempt, it will most likely be one of these four games.
So as games start taking place, instead of hoping for a perfect bracket, my focus will be on creating the most busted bracket in history.
