By CNN
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It’s the hope that kills you as over 99% of March Madness bracket fans brutally discovered after day one of the men’s tournament, which is already delivering its fair share of shocks.
Following the surprise defeats suffered by No. 3 seed Kentucky and No. 8 seed Mississippi State, less than 1% of all brackets remain intact.
According to the NCAA social media account, just 0.00038% of brackets in the men’s tournament are still active. And it is a similar case elsewhere.
Yahoo announced that just 116 perfect brackets remain on its website. Meanwhile ESPN said that over 22 million brackets were broken, with just 1,825 perfect ones left.
So take a bow, Atlanta Falcons running back Bijan Robinson.
The NCAA’s X – formerly known as Twitter – account tweeted that Robinson, who has just finished an excellent rookie campaign in the NFL, was one of the few remaining players with a chance of a perfect bracket.
“Perfect day 1 haha kinda dope,” Robinson replied.
Achieving a perfect bracket is one of the few things in sports left to achieve, with fans needing huge amounts of luck and skill to pick all 63 games correctly.
Due to the number of upsets and “Cinderella” stories March Madness tends to throw up, it has proven an impossible feat so far: the odds of getting every result correct are an extraordinary one to nine quintillion.
As explained to CNN Sport in 2023 by Tim Chartier – distinguished visiting professor at the US National Museum of Mathematics and Joseph R. Morton professor of mathematics and computer science at Davidson College – nine quintillion is a nine followed by 18 zeroes.
Chartier helped put that into context: “I’m going to pick one second in 292 billion years, and your job is to tell me which second I pick.”
If you’re struggling with the numbers, Chartier suggests a physical representation of the nine quintillion to help. He says that the height of nine quintillion dollar bills stacked on top of one another is equivalent to the distance of going from Earth to Pluto over 60 times.
