March Madness: What Are the Odds of a Perfect Bracket?

March Madness is here, and you and your students may be wondering: What are the odds of picking a March Madness perfect bracket this year?

With this in mind, you can inject a little March Mathness and all of its mathematical components into your lessons this month to boost student engagement and teach math in a real-world context!

The lesson resources below include a short video that explores the probability of picking a perfect March Madness bracket (and other events that are actually more likely to occur). The video lesson is a great compliment to these Basketball Math Puzzles for Grades 3-8.

Enjoy!

The NCAA national basketball tournament has begun and March Madness is sweeping the nation.

The tournament is most known for its enormous bracket that widdles down 64 competing colleges and universities to one single champion.

And, like many people, you and your kids love filling out a bracket in an effort to predict as many winners as possible.

Even former president Barack Obama fills out a bracket every year.

With a seemingly infinite amount of possible results to the tournament, celebrating March Madness and all of its mathematical components with your kids is a great way to boost engagement and teach math in a real-world context.

Some fun March Madness math problems for you to share with kids include:

What are the odds of a perfect March Madness bracket if games are chosen at random?

How can you improve your odds of choosing a perfect bracket?

Based on probability, what events are more likely to occur than picking a perfect bracket?

Is a perfect bracket even possible? (check out the video below)

What are the Odds of Picking a Perfect March Madness Bracket?

Picking the correct winner of all 63 tournament games is certainly possible, but insanely, off-the-charts improbable.

In fact, the odds of picking a perfect bracket in the NCAA men's basketball tournament are, at worst, 1 in 9.2 Quintilian!

And, at best, 1 in 128 billion, according to Jeff Bergen, a probability expert from DePaul University.

Presently, there are zero verified cases of a person picking a completely perfect March Madness bracket, and the best ever verified bracket only predicted the first 39 games (of 67 total), which occurred in 2017.

There's a higher probability of…

With the odds of picking a perfect bracket so astronomically high, what events are more likely to occur?

Becoming an Astronaut — 1 : 600

Getting Injured by a Toilet — 1 : 10,000

Bowling a Perfect Game — 1 : 11,500

Winning an Olympic Gold Metal — 1 : 662,000

Getting Struck by Lightning This Year — 1 : 960,000

Becoming President of the U.S.A. — 1 : 10,000,000

Being Killed by a Falling Coconut — 1 : 250,000,000

Looking for more Basketball-Themed Math Activities?

Don’t miss out on these free Basketball-Themed Math Puzzles for Grades 3-8!

Click here to get yours (and an answer key)

And click here to get our best-selling math puzzle workbook: 101 Daily Math Challenges and Puzzles for Students in Grades 3-8!

Of course, sharing math puzzles with your students is just one effective strategy for boosting engagement in your classroom. Subscribe to our mailing list here to get more free daily resources, lesson plans, ideas, and insights for K-12 math teachers in your inbox every week.