As the final buzzer sounded on the March Madness tournament this past Monday, another year of once “perfect” brackets were destroyed by the unpredictable 2026 NCAA Tournament.
“March Madness is the term used to describe the annual men’s and women’s Division I basketball tournament,” junior Jake Mazzocco said. “Every March, I think 68 teams play a bunch of rounds of single-elimination games for the chance to win a national championship.”
According to the NCAA, an estimated 60 to 100 million people fill out brackets annually, making it one of the most popular sports traditions in the country.
“I think watching March madness can bring people together,” senior Rainey Surratt said. “It’s really fun to make a group with friends and compete to see whose bracket makes it the furthest and gets the most points. I also always look forward to watching the tournament with friends and family.”
This year, however, a new method for creating a bracket came into play: Artificial Intelligence.
“I thought using AI would give me an edge over everyone picking based on school mascots, but it turns out even a computer can’t predict a last-second upset from a 12-seed,” Mazzocco said.
Despite the mathematical impossibility, the shift toward AI-assisted brackets changes how students once crafted their brackets. From using simulations that run every game 10,000 times to using AI to find the one Cinderella team(lower-seeded, overlooked underdog).
“I use AI to look at different statistics and make the best bracket based on the past seasons that have taken place and kind of compare that overall, but you still can’t take the luck out of it,” senior Rainey Surratt said.
But no AI was used for the longest lasting 2026 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament. A 14-year-old Pennsylvania 8th grader named Otto Schellhammer had the longest-lasting perfect bracket in 2026, surviving through the first two rounds. But whatever method was used, March Madness is unpredictable. The odds of a perfect 63-game NCAA bracket can be as high as 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
“I make a bracket because it’s fun but also because I’m pretty sure there is a large sum of money for the winner,” Surratt said. “I strongly doubted I had a chance when I made it but making a bracket is free so why wouldn’t I try, you know.”
For the 2026 Men’s NCAA tournament, you can win $1 billion offered for a perfect March Madness bracket through the Kalshi Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge. If no perfect bracket is submitted, the top-scoring bracket wins $1 million.
“The reality is, expert or not, there’s a greater than 99% chance you won’t have a perfect bracket after the first round,” Mazzocco said.
As the tournament moves toward its conclusion, the question is: is it better to trust the machine or the “Madness”?
“I think the real madness isn’t that one upset will ruin your bracket; it’s that we actually think we can predict the future in the first place,” Mazzocco said.
