Bracket IQ

basketball-men-d1 flag

Sam Richmond | krikya18.com | March 18, 2017

March Madness: Last perfect busts after 26 games

  Middle Tennessee came away with a huge upset over Michigan State on Friday.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

With Stephen F. Austin's win over West Virginia on Friday night, the last remaining perfect NCAA tournament bracket has busted.

DatDudeCP, or Cole Parzych, had picked the first 25 games of the NCAA tournament correct in the , the official bracket game of the NCAA. Parzych was perfect through the Wisconsin win over Pittsburgh.

.

Prior to the Maryland-South Dakota State game, there were also two perfect brackets at the ESPN game, but both picked the Jackrabbits. There were also no perfect brackets at the CBS, Yahoo and Bleacher Report games after the 15-2 MTSU upset over Michigan State.

"I am in shock right now," Parzych, a college freshman, told krikya18.com Friday afternoon when his bracket was still perfect.

READ MORE: 

Parzych, who said he doesn’t consider himself an avid college basketball watcher, said he wasn’t even following the tournament that closely on Thursday. But he was glued into the action after he checked his bracket on Friday morning and realized he was still perfect. 

Parzych's riskiest pick that panned out -- and the one that helped separate himself from the field -- was his prediction that Middle Tennessee State University would take down Michigan State. More than 20 percent of brackets had Michigan State winning it all.

His rationale behind his pick had little to do with the teams involved in the game.

"I'm a Syracuse fan, and I picked them to move on to the Sweet 16 and thought the only way they could do that was if Michigan State lost in the first round," he said.

Parzych, a Syracuse, New York native, doesn't just have the Orange going to the Sweet 16, he is predicting Jim Boeheim’s 10th-seeded squad to win its first championships since they took down Kansas in the 2003 finals.

"I'm not feeling so good about that prediction," he said. "But maybe we can recreate some (2003) magic again since I have them beating Kansas in the title game."

Despite Parzych’s pessimism, it’d be hard to fully count Syracuse out right now, given how accurate he’s been so far with his picks.

Parzych was just short of correctly picking the entire first round correctly. In a look at the history of perfection with NCAA tournament brackets earlier this year, we found very few verified brackets ever remain perfect through 32 games.

In fact, 36 was the longest we could find on record, though online records and data hasn't existed in detail since the bracket expanded to at least 64 teams in 1985.

Looks like that mark is safe another year.

College basketball rankings: Even unranked teams find success in the NCAA tournament

Since the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985 — its modern format — only five of 38 national champions were unranked to start the season.
READ MORE

March Madness: One stat shows AP No. 1 is far from a championship lock

It seems like a safe pick. But it’s happened only four times since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
READ MORE

How recent eventual March Madness men's champions did in their conference tournaments

Here's how every DI men's basketball national champion has done in its conference tournament since 1994.
READ MORE