If your March Madness 2025 bracket has already been busted, you have a lot of company.
In fact, if your bracket is still alive, that’s a massive victory in and of itself.
According to the NCAA’s official March Madness Men’s Basketball account on X, only 0.0938% of brackets remain alive after an opening day of action and upsets.
How did we get here?
McNeese State’s 69-67 upset of No. 5 Clemson did most of the heavy lifting early in the day, leaving just 4.48% of brackets unblemished — just 22.41% of pickers selected the 12th-seeded Cowboys to win their opener.
That number dropped even further with No. 6 BYU — led by Tater Tot heir Richie Saunders himself — bouncing No. 11 VCU to leave just 2.61% of brackets alive.
Wins by Gonzaga, Tennessee and Arkansas left less than 1% of brackets — 0.6987 — alive, if understandably not well.
Texas A&M and Drake sent that to under a quarter of a percent, with UCLA, St. John’s, Michigan and Texas Tech closing out Day 1 by leaving just 0.0938% of March Madness brackets unblemished.
If you’re feeling down about going bust early: don’t.
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The odds of actually having a perfect bracket are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 — or just over 9.2 quintillion. Even if you’re a huge college basketball fan with a can’t-miss strategy for filling out the sheet, your chances improve to just 1 in 120.2 billion.
That being said, if you’re in the under 1% percent of folks with a bracket still going, there’s no need to buy a lottery ticket — you’ve already got one.