Will This March Madness Make History?

The Best March Madness Brackets Recorded Since 2015

By Ashton Grenon|Updated on July 6, 2023 (originally published on March 16, 2022)

With March Madness heating up, college basketball fans from all across the country are prepping and shifting their brackets. Filling out a bracket for each and every game of March Madness has become one of the most common traditions in all of sports. While the perfect bracket has yet to be made (the odds of this happening is 1 in 9.2 quintillion), there have been some that have come impressively close.

If you're curious, anybody can create a bracket by simply looking up “March Madness Bracket” on Google. The more popular platforms that offer them are ESPN, Yahoo, and the official NCAA website. The bracket starts off by having 32 first round games. Following this, there are 16 games between the teams that won, and this number continues to shrink until the National Championship game is reached. Just correctly predicting the first 32 correctly is astonishing in itself. In this article, we will take a look at some of the best March Madness brackets ever created.

2019
2019 is home to the single best bracket ever recorded in the history of bracketology. Gregg Nigl correctly picked all of the first 49 games (there are 63 total) correctly, shattering the previous record of 39. However, his bracket lost its magic in the 50th game of March Madness, when Purdue defeated Tennessee. Following that, his bracket only correctly predicted 5 of the final 8 teams, and only 1 of the final 4 teams correctly. Nevertheless, this bracket is the best the world has ever seen. The odds of correctly predicting 49 games are 1 in 562 trillion!

2018
The year of the only #16 seed to ever beat a #1 seed. UMBC taking down Virginia in the first round this year was only correctly chosen by 2.18% of brackets logged by the NCAA. Those 2.18% must've been pretty impressive to get that right!

2017
Yahoo! reported a bracket this year that correctly picked the first 39 games correctly, a record that would stand until Nigl's bracket in 2019.

2016
Like 2018, March Madness 2016 saw a major upset when #15 seed Middle Tennessee State knocked off #2 seed Michigan State. The best bracket to come out of this year only lasted 25 games, but impressively predicted this upset.

2015
ESPN reported a bracket that correctly predicted the first 34 games. This was a new record on the platform (ESPN Tournament Challenge) that had been keeping track of brackets for 18 years at this point.

2014
Yahoo! user, Brad Binder, reigned supreme this year as well. Correctly choosing, a record at the time, 36 games to begin March Madness.

March Madness has garnered a huge amount of national attention. Year after year, millions upon millions of people create brackets in which they attempt to correctly pick the champion. Do you think you have what it takes to create the best bracket ever? Test your luck at: ESPN Tournament Challenge

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