Want to get involved in one of the best fan traditions in all of sports? Welcome to the official bracket game of March Madness — for both the men's and women's tournament.
What is a bracket game?
Want to prove you’re the basketball guru of the office or family? Want to see if your dog can tell the future? That’s where a bracket game comes in.
The NCAA Division I men’s and women's basketball tournaments both start with a bracket of 64 teams. Before the games begin, you can try your hand at predicting the winner for each one of the 63 games. Your methodology is entirely up to you, whether that's takinga deep dive into the statistics, flipping a coin, or havingyour dog make picks for you.
Then, sit back and watch the madness unfold as you revel in victory, or witness your bracket get busted before the first weekend.
As the games progress, you’ll get points for every winner you picked correctly. Those points increase every round (games in the second round are worth twice as much as games in the first round, and so on).At the end of the tournament, the player in each group with the most points wins that group.
How to play
You can sign up for both the men's and women's Bracket Challenge games here.
Important dates
Today: Sign up!
You can sign up for the Men’s and Women's Bracket Challenge games right now, by going to this site. If you are a returning user, you can sign in using your email, or with an Apple, Facebook, or Google account. If you have forgotten your password, click the ‘Trouble Signing In?’ link, where you can reset your password, or get a magic link to sign in directly.
If you are a new user, you can sign up for a Play account using your email, or with an Apple, Facebook or Google account. You can use the account to play the Men’s Bracket Challenge game, Women’s Bracket Challenge game,Tournament Run, Men's Conference Tournament Pick'Em andWomen's Conference Tournament Pick'Em.
All games will go live on Thursday, Feb. 8.
Sunday, March 17: Selection Sunday
On this day, the selection committee will reveal the 68 teams that made the tournament’s field and the final bracket for both tournaments. Once they are announced, brackets will open up for picking for the first time.
Thursday, March 21 (men) and Friday, March 22 (women): First round starts
The first games of the first rounds will start on these days — the men on Thursday and the women on Friday. Right before the first games tip off, bracket picking will lock, and you won’t be able to change any picks in your bracket for the remainder of the tournament. Don’t get caught with an incomplete bracket before then.
Sunday, April 7 (women) and Monday, April 8 (men): Championship game
The national championship games will be played on consecutive nights. After each tournament concludes, the scores for both Bracket Challenge games will be final.
Want a little more history about NCAA tournament brackets?
Let’s start with the basics.
Where do brackets come from?
According to Slate, the very first bracket in a sports tournament came in 1851, at a chess tournament in London. With the city hosting the Great Exhibition for British technology, English chess master Howard Staunton set out to organize the world’s first international chess tournament.
In order to whittle the 16-player field down to one winner, Staunton decided to make eight pairs, with the losers of each being eliminated from contention. Instead of seeding players to decide pairings (like the modern NCAA tournament), Staunton had each draw a randomlot.
RELATED:What is March Madness: The NCAA tournament explained
“Eight white tickets and eight yellow ones numbered respectively, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, were put into the ballot-box,” Staunton wrote in a book on the tournament. “Whoever drew No. 1 of the white tickets had to play with the party who drew No. 1 of the yellow… and so on throughout.”
After the first round, the eight winners drew tickets again for fresh adversaries, all the way to the championship match.
“The mode adopted for pairing the combatants, will, it is hoped, bring the two best players in the Tournament into collision for the chief prize.”
Staunton's first bracket fell short of achieving that goal, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Why is it called a bracket?
It's a fairly simple explanation: The shape of sports brackets highly resemble those of the punctuation symbols also known as brackets: ] [ and { }.
Just look at the bracket from Staunton’s 1851 chess tournament:
Sure, that doesn't look much like a modern bracket (since second-round matchups in his tournament were decided by drawing new lots, only first-round matchups were listed), but you can certainly see why it would be called a bracket.
How does theNCAA tournament bracket work?
Before we get into the specifics, let's take a look at what the modern NCAA Division I men's basketball championship bracket looks like(and here's a PDF):
While the NCAA tournament bracket can likely trace its origin back to the1851 chess tournament, a few problems that arose in that tournament helped shape the NCAA tournament bracket differently.
After the chess tournament, Staunton admitted that there were a lot of complaints about the random drawing, with some players getting much easier routes through the tournament based on multiple lucky draws, and top players being paired against each other in the first round, forcing one to be eliminated very early — two issues that are not conducive to a properly competitive or entertaining tournament.
The modern NCAA tournament bracket solves these two complaints in two ways.
First, it seeds all teams based on their skill level. Seeding is an official ranking compiled by the tournament's Selection Committee — a 12-member group of school and conference administratorsresponsible for selecting, seeding and bracketing the field. The results of this process are made public when the tournament bracket is releasedon Selection Sunday. There are two types of seeding in the modern tournament.
- First is the region seed, whichis most often what people are referring to when they mention a team's seed. The NCAA tournament bracket is split into four regions that correspond to the locations in the United States where the opening rounds are played: East, West, Midwest, and South. Each region has 16 teams, which are each ranked 1 (the highest)through 16 (the lowest).
- Second is the overall seed, which ranks each of the 68 teams in the tournament 1 (the highest)through 68 (the lowest). This is used to help determine which seeds are placed in which regions. For fairness, the committee tries not to place the best 1 seed in the same region as the best 2 seed, and so on.
This process serves to reward teams that performed better in the regular seasonwith easier routes to the championship and also spreads the best teams throughout the bracket so that no region is unfairly lopsided and competition is as fair as possible.
Second, instead of having teams redraw for new competition after every round, the NCAA tournament bracket’s advancement is set before any team plays. All potential matchups in allrounds are established clearly before the first game tips off.
The NCAA tournament is a single elimination bracket, meaning teams are eliminated from the tournament after a single loss. Win or go home. Other sports tournaments employ multiple-elimination brackets. For example, the College World Series is a double-elimination tournament, where teams are no longer in the running for the championship after they lose two games.
Finally, the current NCAA tournament has 68 teams. Eight of the lowest-rankedteams play in the First Four — eight games played before the first round of the tournament to narrow the field down to 64. From there, the bracket is very straightforward, with six rounds played, each one cutting the field in half until there is a champion.
For a little more background, let's take a quick look at how the NCAA men's basketball tournament field is compiled.
Teams have two ways to earn an invitation to the tournament field:
An automatic bid is awarded to any team that wins its conference tournament championship. There are 32 of these available.
An at-large bid is awarded to any team chosen by the Selection Committee for its performance during the season. The Selection Committee looks at a wide range of statistics, from strength of schedule to the newly released NET rankings. But there is no set formula for which teams receive an at-large bid. Even a team ranked No. 1 in the AP Poll is not guaranteed an invitation.
When did brackets get popular?
The public didn't always scramble to fill out brackets and join March Madness poolsevery March. In fact, it's a relatively new phenomenon in the scope of the tournament.
The NCAA tournament’s bracket was volatile through much of its first half-century, with the format and number of teams changing multiple times throughout, leading to some brackets that were far fromuser-friendly. For instance, in 1959, the tournament consisted of 23 teams, with nine receiving first-round byes. That certainly limits the appeal to the casual fan.
Furthermore, in the 1960s and 70s, UCLA won 10 championships in a period of 12 years. There wasn’t much thrill in picking a bracket when everyone knew who was going to win it. In 1975 — what would be UCLA’s last championship of that run — the tournament expanded from 25 to 32 teams. In 1985, the tournament made another huge leap, from 53 teams to 64, adding more games and more chances for upsets.
According to the Smithsonian, the first bracket pool started in 1977 in a Staten Island bar, where 88 people filled out brackets and pitted themagainst each other's. They were on to something. In 2018, tens of millions of brackets were filled out through major online bracket games, and whileit's impossible to count the number of paper brackets filled out offline, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that group also ranks in themillions.
And every one of those millions of brackets has one goal: To be perfect.
What are the odds of a perfect bracket?
That’s tough to say exactly, but we'll get two things out of the way quickly. One, no one has ever filled out a verifiably perfect men's bracket in the history of the modern NCAA tournament. Two, no one likely ever will, because the odds are infinitesimallysmall. So astronomically small that in reality they're practically zero. Let's take a look.
Virtually all NCAA tournament brackets disregard the First Four and only pick games starting with the first round. Since there are 64 teams in those brackets, the most basic calculation is the number of possible outcomes for 63 games picked randomly. That would be 2 (the number of potential winners for each game) to the 63rd power (the number of games in the bracket). More simply, that's 2 times 2, 63 times, which is equal to roughly 9.2 quintillion.
For reference, if you filled out 1 billion random brackets every single second for 100 straight years, you would still be 6 quintillion brackets shy of 9.2 quintillion.
But that only applies if every game is a coin flip. In practice, there’s a lot of information that usually goes into picking brackets. The most basic is seeding, which we discussed earlier. Since every team is seeded 1-16 in its region — with the highest-ranked team receiving a 1 seed, and the lowest a 16 — even someone who has no basketball knowledge at all can make a somewhat educated guess on which team is favored in each matchup.
The late DePaul professor Jeff Bergen broke down the odds for someone making informed decisions for each game and came up with odds of 1 in 128 billion. Much better that 1 in 9 quintillion for sure, but still almost so low as to be negligible.
If every single person in the U.S. had the basketball knowledge Bergen accounted for, and each filled out a bracket, the chance that one of those would be perfect is less than 0.25 percent.
What’s more, a lot of the calculations for perfect brackets assumed that the 1-vs-16 matchup was an automatic win for the 1 seed, since before 2018, a 1 seed had never lost to a 16 seed in the history of the tournament. Since UMBC showed that upset was possible, the odds of a perfect bracket just got even worse. Sorry.
