March Madness Perfect Bracket's Near Impossible Odds: Among The Big Payouts Is The X Offer For Trip To Mars

March Madness 2025 has arrived with the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament set to kick off the round of 64 games on Thursday, March 20.

For years, sports fans and non-sports fans alike have competed in office pools, online challenges and other contests to make a perfect bracket picking the winners of 63 games and ultimately always come up short.

Just how rare is a perfect bracket — and is it even possible? Here's a look at the odds.

Perfect Bracket Odds: The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament expanded in 1985 to a field of 64 teams competing in 63 games. While the field has expanded to include some play-in games, the main tournament follows the same format.

A verified perfect bracket has never occurred since the field expanded in 1985, according to NCAA.com.

The closest a bracket came was in 2019, when an Ohio neuropsychologist picked games correctly through the first 49 games. The bracket from Gregg Nigl marked the first time someone correctly predicted the games through the Sweet 16 and is the longest perfect bracket of all time.

Prior to 2019, the closest a bracket made it was 39 games in the 2017 tournament.

The closest a bracket made it in last year's March Madness tournament was reported to be to game 31, nearly giving one contestant a perfect bracket through the Sweet 16.

The Odds Of A Perfect March Madness Bracket: The odds to correctly predict the outcome of all 63 games during the tournament are 1 in 9.2 quintillion based on a 50-50 coin flip and all possible outcomes (that's 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 in numerical form).

Late DePaul University professor Jeff Bergen projected the odds could be 1 in 128 billion for those who know about basketball and follow seed trends.

Bergen estimated it could take 2,300 years for every person on the planet filling out a bracket every minute to fill out all 9.2 quintillion outcomes.

The DePaul professor said that you would have a better chance of winning the Powerball and Mega Million in the same week after buying one ticket in each lottery than having a perfect bracket. The current odds to win the Mega Millions and PowerBall jackpots are 1 in 302.6 million and 1 in 292.2 million, respectively.

Here are some other similar odds from Bergen:

Predicting the winning political party for each of the next 62 presidential elections
Picking six people at random on the street and they all have the same birthday as you
An NBA player making 414 free throws in a row (the current record is 97)
An MLB pitcher striking out 31 batters in a row (the current record is 13)

Georgia Tech professor Joel Sokol used statistics to come up with some models for predicting the March Madness tournament. The professor sees odds of 1 in 120.2 billion for scoring a perfect bracket based on past odds and statistics.

Sokol estimates that if every person in the U.S. filled out a bracket that was around 66.7% accurate (a recent average), a perfect bracket would likely occur 366 years from today, or in the year 2385.

Here's a crazy analogy from the NCAA on the odds of a perfect bracket. If an acorn was hidden in one of the 3 trillion trees on the planet, you would have a 3 million times greater chance of finding the acorn on the first guess than picking a perfect bracket.

Big Payouts: With the odds of getting a perfect bracket being near impossible, several companies have taken advantage of playing the odds with huge promotional events.

BetMGM previously offered a $10-million prize for a perfect bracket.

In 2022, a contest was hosted by Bally's Corp that offered to pay out $100 million for a perfect bracket.

Back in 2014, Berkshire Hathaway Inc BRKBRK CEO Warren Buffett offered a $1 billion prize in partnership with Yahoo Sports and Quicken Loans for a perfect bracket.

Buffett is mixing things up this year offering $1 million to any employee in the Berkshire Hathaway competition who can correctly predict 30 of the first 32 games.

“I’m getting older," Buffett told The Wall Street Journal. "I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman."

In 2024, around 65,000 of Berkshire’s 400,000 employees participated in the challenge. With the odds increasingly better to win $1 million, it will be interesting to see if more people participate.

Social media platform X is offering a trip to Mars on a SpaceX rocket for anyone with a perfect bracket. With no perfect brackets, the top prize will be $100,000.

USA Today is offering $1 million for a perfect bracket this year, with $25,000 to the top performer if no one is perfect.

Last year, PepsiCo PEP had the "Zero Right Bracket Challenge" in partnership with DraftKings Inc DKNG giving fans the goal of getting no games right out of the 63 possible picks. The challenge is back this year with $100,000 for a perfectly incorrect bracket.

What's Next: The Round of 64 games begin on Thursday, March 20 and will air on TruTV, TBS and TNT, which are owned by Warner Bros. Discovery WBD and on CBS, which is owned by Paramount Global PARAPARAA.

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