Busted Brackets. Yahoo! has NCAA Tournament Madness by the Numbers

The 2011 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament has not been kind to the ‘by-the-numbers’ methodology that many people use to fill out their brackets each year. With none of the #1 or #2 seeds making it through to the Final Four for the first time ever, this year’s tournament has been chalk-full of shocking upsets, baffling fans and experts alike.

More than 3 million Yahoo! Tourney Pick’em brackets were filled out this year. Get every game right, and you could win $1,000,000 for a “perfect bracket.” This year, however, not one bracket was even perfect after the Round of 64, so it’s down to the $10,000 “Best Bracket” portion of the contest.

Experts have said this is the maddest NCAA Tournament ever, and Yahoo! has the data to prove it:

• Out of more than 3 million registered Yahoo! Tourney Pick’em brackets, none were perfect after the first round of the tournament
• Only 3 brackets were able to even pick 31 of the 32 first round winners correctly
• Over 80% of brackets failed to project a single Final Four team correctly
• Only 5.7% of all brackets even had all 4 of these Final Four teams winning in the first round, let alone making it to the Final Four
• Only 1 bracket has predicted all 4 of the Final Four teams correctly
• Pick percentages for each of the Final Four teams to make it this far were: UConn = 20.4%, Kentucky = 6.6%, Butler = 0.6%, VCU = 0.1%
• Of the 4 teams left, the pick percentages for each to win the championship are: UConn = 3.3%, Kentucky = 1.4%, Butler = 0.1%, VCU = 0.0% (negligible, although roughly 400 people did pick them)
• An infinitesimal 0.023% of brackets have both potential championship participants remaining
• Despite seeing VCU play in the first 2 rounds, only 6.0% of registered brackets picked them to make the Final Four in Yahoo!’s Second Chance Tourney Pick’em game (where people pick from the Sweet 16 on), and only 0.6% are picking them to win the national championship game
• Out of hundreds of thousands of entries in the Second Chance game only has 7 brackets that are still “perfect”

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Edwin Pankau

Sr. Product Manager, Fantasy Sports