How many perfect brackets are left after one day?

UPDATE SATURDAY MORNING:  As of Friday night, there are no perfect brackets left among ESPN's 22 million entries.


ORIGINAL STORY:
After Thursday's first volley of 16 NCAA tournament basketball games, do you still have a perfect bracket?

Of course you don't.

In fact, less than .003 percent of brackets survived to start a new day.

ESPN received 22,055,615 entries in its annual bracket challenge. Of those, 658 are still mistake-free.

The carnage began early, with a typical 8-9 seed tossup. When #9 West Virginia lost, 10.3 million brackets -- 47 percent -- bit the dust.

An early upset took another big bite when Furman surprised Virginia, and another 8.1 million brackets got a red mark.

As it turns out, Friday is the usual day that all hopes of perfection vanish.

Last year, the last verifiably perfect men’s NCAA bracket in 2022 busted on the first Friday of the tournament when No. 11 Iowa State upset No. 6 LSU, 59-54. 

In 2021, multiple monumental upsets had all of the remaining perfect ESPN brackets busted on the 28th game. 

The longest streak of correct picks seen in any March Madness bracket -- ESPN and all the others -- was 39 games, achieved in 2017.

Then, according to NCAA.com, Gregg Nigl of Ohio shattered that record with his entry in the Capital One NCAA March Madness Bracket Challenge, which correctly predicted the first 49 games of the 2019 tournament before busting in game 50, when 3-seed Purdue beat 2-seed Tennessee 99-94 in overtime of the second game in the Sweet 16.

Nigl, a neuropsychologist from Columbus, became the first verified bracket ever to pick through to the Sweet 16 correctly.

With more than three decades of online and paper brackets to sift through (the current format has existed since 1985) and with somewhere between an estimated 60 million to 100 million brackets filled out every year, it's very possible that someone, somewhere has done better.

Determining an official record is made even more difficult by the fact that online games only recently have begun comprehensive record-keeping.