The month of March is home to one of the sports world’s largest and most exciting playoff tournaments: March Madness. The sixty-eight team contest culminates in crowning the national champion for collegiate basketball. Each year before the tournament, a selection committee chooses the teams that will make the tournament based on regular season and conference tournament performance. The teams are split into four regions: South, Midwest, East and West. The tournament does not start with the first round, rather it starts before that in Dayton, Ohio with the First Four. This two-day tournament involves eight teams competing for the last four spots in the first round of the larger March Madness tournament. The First Four is composed of the four lowest seeded automatic qualifiers and the four lowest seeded at large teams, ultimately narrowing down the field to sixty-four teams. Following the First Four, four regions each comprising of sixteen teams remain. 

On Sunday, March 16th, the selection committee unveiled the seeding for the tournament. For the men’s tournament, Auburn was assigned the overall top seed, with Duke, Houston, and Florida each being the top seed for their region. For the women’s tournament, UCLA earned the overall number one seed with South Carolina, USC, and Texas leading their regions. The first round of the men’s and women’s tournaments will begin on March 20th and March 21st respectively. Despite the chaos that is ever present in the single elimination tournament, every year millions of people will try to predict the outcome. In 2023, 68 million brackets were submitted. With this many brackets submitted each year, it may seem that eventually one would be perfect; however, the odds of this happening are astronomically small. Assuming a bracket-maker selected each game with a coin flip, the odds of the bracket being perfect would be 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Applying some knowledge of basketball and the tournament lowers the odds to a mere 1 in 120 billion. The closest anyone has ever gotten to a perfect bracket is 49 straight correct picks. Statistically, with these odds and around 68 million brackets each year, one perfect bracket could be expected around every 2,000 years.