No perfect NCAA bracket lasted through the first round on Friday night, thanks to the historic 16-1 upset of UMBC over Virginia. Here's where we stood in each of the previous years: 2018 Gregg Nigl's 2019 NCAA bracket is perfect through the first two rounds. Prior to 2016, we've relied on those games' reports as well as online archives to get the best information available. We've closely tracked about 20-to-25 million online brackets per year at a half dozen major games since 2016 using public leaderboards in combination with direct reporting and information gathering with those games. Determining an official record is made even more difficult by the fact that online games only recently have begun comprehensive record-keeping. With more than three decades of online and paper brackets to sift through (the current format has existed since 1985) and with somewhere between an estimated 60 million to 100 million brackets filled out every year, it's very possible that someone, somewhere has done better.
Nigl, a neuropsychologist from Columbus, Ohio, became the first verified bracket ever to pick through to the Sweet 16 correctly. Then Gregg Nigl, of Columbus, shattered that record with his briefly-famous " center road" NCAA tournament bracket in the Capital One NCAA March Madness Bracket Challenge, which correctly predicted the first 49 games of the 2019 tournament before busting in game 50, when 3-seed Purdue beat 2-seed Tennessee 99-94 in overtime of the second game in the Sweet 16. QUEST: We're tracking perfect brackets in the 2021 NCAA tournamentīefore the 2019 NCAA tournament, the longest streak of correct picks we had seen in a March Madness bracket was 39 games, achieved in 2017. That of course follows 2020, when Covid-19 forced the cancellation of the NCAA tournament. In 2021, multiple monumental upsets had all of the remaining perfect brackets busted on the 28 thgame.