Perfect March Madness brackets could be gone before weekend

By MARK ANDERSON
AP Sports Writer

The dwindling number of perfect NCAA Tournament brackets might reach zero before the weekend.

The NCAA March Madness Twitter account posted after Friday’s early games that only 30 such brackets remained. That’s out of millions, though the account didn’t say how many exactly.

In ESPN’s Tournament Challenge bracket game, only 22 perfect brackets out of more than 20 million filled out were still out there with eight first-round games left to play. ESPN had no perfect brackets entering the weekend last year.

Victories by double-digit seeds Princeton, Penn State and Furman on Thursday did particular damage. Only 1.4% of ESPN’s brackets had all three teams making it out of the first round, and only 0.1% had them surviving the weekend.

On CBS’ site, 0.0003% of brackets were perfect through the eight early Friday games, according to Jared Shanker, the network’s senior director of digital communications.

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AP March Madness coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness and bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-basketball-poll and https://twitter.com/AP_Top25