Carson Neuhausen | News Editor
March 20, 2026
As the 2026 NCAA March Madness tournament tips off, fans are already reflecting on their early bracket selections. From high-seed upsets to 1-point games, the first day of competition has already delivered the chaos and unpredictability that fans crave.
The tournament began with the “First Four” games, a set of match ups that determined the final four teams to punch their tickets to the playoffs. Both Howard vs. UMBC (86-83) and Texas vs. NC State (68-66) set the tone for what could be a month full of intense finishes and close games.
With that said, the top-seeded teams all won handily against their lower-ranked opponents. Michigan (1), Illinois (3), and Nebraska (4) all won their games by a margin of 20 or more, while Duke (1) managed to pull away from Siena (16) at the end of the highly contested match-up. However, as we have come to expect, March Madness’s reputation quickly revealed itself. The most notable upset has been High Point’s (12) 83-82 defeat of Wisconsin (5). The game ended in disaster for the Badgers as Chase Johnston scored his first 2-point basket of the season to win the game with 11.2 seconds left. Some other major upsets included VCU’s (11) victory over UNC (6) and Texas’s (11) win over BYU (6).
There have also been a number of extremely tight games that have played a role in busting millions of brackets. The first game of the official tournament, TCU (9) vs. Ohio State (8), busted just under 16,000,000 brackets according to ESPN’s “People’s Bracket,” as the Horned Frogs escaped with a 66-64 victory over the Buckeyes. Louisville’s (6) 83-79 win over USF (11) was another matchup that busted brackets, as 40% of users chose the Bulls to upset the Cardinals. SCHS senior and former basketball player Kyle Alchar commented that he “was excited about [his] bracket until [he] watched Ohio State’s point guard throw up the worst game-winning shot [he’s] ever seen.”
Looking at the “Bracketology” aspect of the tournament, some interesting statistics jump out. According to the ESPN March Madness Tournament Challenge Website, only 10,754 out of the 26,567,846 brackets created have stayed true (approx. 0.04%) after the first 16 games. Of those 10,754 perfect brackets, 6,313 have picked Kentucky to beat Santa Clara, meaning that if no other match-ups were played tomorrow, roughly half of all flawless entries would still be broken. With that in mind, it is easy to see how improbable it is for someone to get every pick correct. To quantify the difficulty, each individual has a 1 in 9.2 quintillion chance of predicting the exact outcome of the tournament; those odds increase to around 1 in 120 billion with mid to high-level basketball knowledge. SCHS senior and non-basketball fan Dylan Kieffer told me that he “filled out a bracket based on vibes and logos and managed to predict almost all of the upsets.”
I personally enjoy following various college teams throughout the season, and I can confidently say that Dylan’s bracket could very well beat my semi-educated guesses. That is the beauty of March Madness, the randomness of it. While we may see it through the lens of our bracket, behind each upset is a team of young men, many of whom may never play basketball competitively again, achieving their wildest dreams.
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