Here’s how many perfect March Madness brackets remain after Thursday

Did your bracket get busted on Thursday? Don’t worry, almost everyone’s did. Three significant upsets marked the first major day of competition in the NCAA men’s tournament, with High Point (12) stunning Wisconsin (5), VCU (11) eliminating North Carolina (6), and Texas (11) handling BYU (6) to close out the evening. Beyond that we had another three games where the lower seed won.

Not too bad for a tournament many thought would be chalk, but it isn’t called March Madness for nothing. It led to a truly staggering number of brackets falling on one day, but somehow we still have people with a perfect bracket intact — left to dream the impossible dream that they can go all the way.

Leading the charge is ESPN, where the majority of brackets were filled out as part of the network’s bracket challenge with cash prizes in play. There are now 10,754 perfect brackets remaining, which might sound like a lot — until you realize that 26,557,092 busted. This means that of the over 26.5M brackets that were filled out on ESPN, only 0.04% of the brackets are perfect.

It’s a similar story over on Yahoo for their bracket challenge. While Yahoo didn’t report direct numbers, they are publicly saying that only 0.1% of brackets left in their challenge remain perfect — which would be over twice the percentage of ESPN’s.

The NCAA is tracking brackets across all platforms, including smaller sites, saying that their official figures show “just over 14,000 perfect brackets” out of more than 36M total entries. This represents 0.39% of total submissions still vying for perfection. In addition, here’s the NCAA breakdown of Thursday’s results compared to past year’s after the first full Thursday of games.

• 2026: 14,000
• 2025: 36,000+
• 2023: 787
• 2022: 192
• 2021: 121
• 2019: 60,000

With another full slate of games on Friday we’re going to see more brackets fall, and we’ll update as the numbers continue to fall.