CNN
—
It has become a rite of passage for sports fans to fill out their annual March Madness brackets for the NCAA basketball tournaments.
However, all the planning and preparation for many has been blown out the water with No. 15 seed Princeton’s shock victory against the No. 2 seeded Arizona.
According to the NCAA March Madness Twitter, only 0.065% of the millions of brackets completed remain intact following the Tigers’ upset.
The game was fiercely contested throughout with the Arizona Wildcats taking only a one-point lead heading into the half-time break.
A quick start to the second-half put the No. 2 seeds in complete control with the game finally starting to follow its script.
But March Madness has developed a reputation for the impossible becoming possible and, trailing by 10 points with around eight minutes left to play, the Tigers clawed their way back into the game.
The Tigers roared back with a 9-0 run to close out proceedings and complete a famous 59-55 win.
![230317080813-01-march-madness-princeton-arizona-0316-1 Princeton Tigers beat the Arizona Wildcats 59-55 and sprayed head coach Mitch Henderson with water after the win.](https://cqonews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/230317080813-01-march-madness-princeton-arizona-0316-1.jpg)
It is no surprise that only 0.065% brackets lasted past this game with the odds of predicting a correct bracket an extraordinary one to nine quintillion.
Tim Chartier, a distinguished visiting professor at the US National Museum of Mathematics and Joseph R. Morton professor of mathematics and computer science at Davidson College, explained to CNN the likelihood of having a successful bracket.
“I’m going to pick one second in 292 billion years, and your job is to tell me which second I pick,” Chartier explains.
“There is a stat out there that there’s a one in 10,000 chance that you get injured by a toilet. So there are better odds that that same family of four all get injured by the toilet than picking a perfect bracket,” the professor continues.
The remaining entrants will be hoping their luck remains intact with several more shocks set to take place throughout the month of March.
CNN’s Ben Morse contributed to reporting.