Every March, tens of millions of Americans fill out NCAA Tournament brackets with a quiet, familiar belief: This could be the year.

It won’t be.

No one — not a diehard fan, not a data scientist, not a professional oddsmaker — has ever submitted a verifiably perfect bracket. And the math behind why is almost absurd.

The numbers are staggering

A standard NCAA Tournament features 63 games. Each game has two possible outcomes. That means there are:

2⁶³ possible brackets — about 9.2 quintillion.

That’s 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 different ways a tournament could unfold.

To put that in perspective: a quintillion is a billion billions. It’s the kind of number that stops feeling real.

If you picked every game by coin flip, your odds of a perfect bracket would be exactly 1 in 9.2 quintillion.

Even if you actually know basketball, the improvement is marginal in any practical sense. Estimates suggest a highly informed fan might improve their odds to somewhere around 1 in 100 billion, still astronomically unlikely.

Perspective helps — but not much

For comparison:

The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are about 1 in 292 million

The odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are about 1 in 15,000

Even using more optimistic “informed” bracket odds, you are millions of times more likely to be struck by lightning than to pick a perfect bracket.

If you go with pure randomness, that gap explodes into the hundreds of trillions.

Either way, perfection isn’t just unlikely — it’s effectively out of reach.

The closest calls

The best attempts only reinforce the point.

In 2019, Greg Nigl of Ohio correctly picked the first 49 games of the men’s tournament — the deepest verified perfect run ever recorded. His bracket finally broke in the Sweet 16.

On the women’s side, near-perfect brackets have gone even deeper in recent years, with some entries missing just one or two games. Still, none have reached perfection.

Even in large online contests, perfect brackets typically disappear within the first weekend. In some years, none survive past the opening round.

Why “smart picks” don’t save you

You might assume there’s a strategy to crack the code — picking favorites, following advanced metrics, or riding trends.

And to a degree, there is.

Picking all higher seeds (“going chalk”) actually produces the single most likely overall bracket. But “most likely” doesn’t mean likely. The odds of a perfect chalk bracket are still often estimated in the tens of billions to one.

The problem is simple: March Madness is built on chaos.

Every year brings upsets that shatter otherwise strong brackets. In 2022, No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s made a run to the Elite Eight — something almost no one predicted. One game like that is enough to eliminate millions of brackets instantly.

And there are always games like that.

A national obsession

Despite the odds, Americans keep playing.

Roughly tens of millions of brackets are filled out each year, with office pools, online contests and friendly wagers driving the frenzy. Billions of dollars are legally bet on the tournament, and the distraction costs U.S. workplaces billions more in lost productivity — at least by some estimates.

Even Warren Buffett once offered a $1 billion prize for a perfect bracket. No one came close.

The point isn’t perfection

The perfect bracket isn’t really a goal. It’s a myth — a statistical long shot so extreme that it borders on impossible.

But that’s exactly why it works.

Because every upset, every buzzer-beater, every busted bracket is a reminder of what makes March Madness compelling in the first place: unpredictability.

You won’t get a perfect bracket.

But for a few days, maybe even a couple of rounds, it might feel like you could.

And that’s enough.