As a teen who enjoys watching college basketball, March Madness is the greatest time of the school year. There is no better feeling than being crowded around a computer screen with your friends hoping that the team you picked wins so you can maintain your perfect bracket. March Madness is a college basketball tournament, created in 1939, consisting of 64 teams. 32 of these teams make the tournament by winning their conference tournament and the rest are decided by the NCAA tournament committee. The tournament has 4 regions, North, South, East, and West. The teams are divided up into these regions and seeded based on their record and other statistics.

Every year, millions of people fill out a bracket from all over the world hoping that it will be perfect. Up to this point, nobody has come close to a perfect bracket, and nobody ever will. It is said that the odds of creating a perfect bracket is 1 in 9.2 quintillion. There are an estimated 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on Earth. If I picked one at random and had you guess which of the 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on the planet it was, your odds of being correct would be 23% better than your odds of picking a perfect bracket. Upsets are a big reason that making a perfect bracket is so tough.

The 2023 tournament just kicked off Yesterday and only 700 of 20,000,000 brackets remain perfect. In the 16 games yesterday, there were 4 upsets. No. 9 Auburn upset No. 8 Iowa, No. 10 Penn. State upset No. 7 Texas A&M, No. 13 Furman upset No. 4 Virginia, and the most unpredictable one of all, No. 15 Princeton upset No. 2 Arizona, a team who many had favored to win the tournament. In my first bracket I went 13 for 16 on the first day while my second was 10 for 16. I predicted Texas to win in my first bracket but I unfortunately had Arizona making the championship which is no longer possible. I predicted UCLA to win my second bracket and my final four is still in tact with my prediciton of Alabama, Duke, Xavier, and UCLA.