The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

There’s only one perfect NCAA tournament bracket left. It probably isn’t yours.

March 25, 2019 at 9:08 a.m. EDT
Oregon is the lone team to break this year’s chalky run in the NCAA tournament. (Jeff Chiu/AP)

With all 12 teams seeded 1-3 and only one team seeded lower than fifth advancing to the Sweet 16, chalky brackets are ruling the roost after the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. But according to the NCAA, there’s only one perfect bracket remaining out of the millions submitted in contests run by the organization, ESPN, Yahoo, CBS, Fox and Sports Illustrated: an entry dubbed “Center Road” in the NCAA’s bracket challenge.

NCAA tournament: The Sweet 16 is set, and boy is it top-heavy

Picking 48 straight games correctly is quite the accomplishment. The NCAA says it’s the longest streak of correct picks it’s ever seen, shattering the record of 39 set in 2017.

“Center Road” sticks with the chalky theme of this year’s tournament with the Sweet 16 picks, picking the eight higher-seeded teams to win. That would create the first Elite Eight consisting entirely of No. 1 and No. 2 seeds.

Over at Yahoo, an entry called “Court Stormers” picked the first 43 games correctly to break that company’s record of 39, set two years ago, before whiffing on Sunday evening’s Texas Tech-Buffalo game, that entry’s lone incorrect pick. Four other entries in the Yahoo contest have only two incorrect picks.

The two leaders atop ESPN’s contest both have the same incorrect pick, with “Molly” and “Craig” both wrongly selecting Cincinnati to beat Iowa on Friday afternoon.

As far as celebrities go, actor Jim Parsons picked 15 of 16 region semifinal teams correctly in the “Dan Patrick Show” contest, incorrectly choosing Kansas State instead of Oregon. Former president Barack Obama, meanwhile, correctly picked 12 of the 16 remaining teams, including Oregon.

But what about the boldly named “Perfect Bracket” submitted by The Post’s own Neil Greenberg? Well, our numbers guy has picked 37 of 48 games correctly, whiffing on Wisconsin (Greenberg had the Badgers, a first-round loser, upsetting Virginia and advancing to the Elite Eight) and Iowa State (he also had the Cyclones in the Sweet 16, and they didn’t make it past Ohio State in the first round). Greenberg did correctly predict the other 14 participants in the Sweet 16, however.

Read more:

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