A perfectly unperfect 0-21 to start the tournament is... impressive.
After the first day of the Round of 64, fewer than 1 percent of all brackets on online trackable bracket games were still perfect. But that pales in comparison to a much more select group.
Five of our Capital One Bracket Challenge Game started the tournament a perfectly unperfect 0-21.
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We first saw this trend when Kevin Kaduk of reported on a , which started the tournament 0-16 before slipping up and correctly picking Michigan to beat Oklahoma State.
And yes, there are a few surefire ways to improve your odds of getting a perfectly wrong bracket. Seven of the nine brackets that started the tournament 0-20 had all 15 and 16 seeds winning their first-round games (reminder, 16 seeds are currently 0-130, and 15 seeds are 8-121). One bracket, , picked all the 15 and 16s except for Texas Southern, which it has losing to 1-seed UNC, and only two brackets had zero 16 seeds in their Final Fours — and .
But still. Going 0-21 is impressive no matter what.
The odds of flipping a coin and getting heads 21 times in a row is .0000476837158203125 percent. That's 1 in 2,097,152.
Through 19 games, the most respectable bracket of all the unperfects was . Unfortunately, that bracket left its peers behind and enter the realm of brackets with at least one correct pick when its national champion pick — Oregon — took down Iona in the 20th game of the tournament. Breadballer had 1-seed Kansas, 1-seed UNC, and 2-seed Kentucky winning, and a Final Four of 9-seed Vanderbilt, 9-seed Virginia Tech, 5-seed Minnesota, and 3-seed Oregon, with the Ducks (the only one of those four still in the tournament) winning the title.
Only one other unperfect bracket had no double-digit seeds in its Final Four. picked 7-seed South Carolina, 9-seed Vanderbilt, 8-seed Miami, and 7-seed Dayton to make it to Phoenix, and Vanderbilt (which lost to Northwestern in its opening game) to become the lowest seed ever to win the national title, but unfortunately, DITB Upset correctly picked Arkansas to take down Seton Hall in the 19th game of the tournament. The Arkansas win was actually the first of the tournament for three of our brackets.
Sadly, with 11-seed USC's 66-65 win over 6-seed SMU, all five of the remaining unperfect brackets picked up their first win.
Maybe next year.
