By JIMMY GOLEN
AP Sports Writer
There are 583 people whose NCAA Tournament brackets survived victories by double-digit seeds Oakland, Duquesne and North Carolina State, and exactly one unlucky person who has been perfectly imperfect.
Just one of the 22.6 million entries in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge had gotten every result wrong through the early games on Friday. That means they took a flyer on No. 16 seed Wagner over top-seeded North Carolina but missed on the actual losses by third-seeded Kentucky and 6 seeds Texas Tech and Brigham Young.
Florida Atlantic’s loss to Northwestern knocked out about half of the perfect brackets that made it through Thursday’s games, when only 1,825 survived. The eighth-seeded Wildcats were picked in about 45% of brackets that were still alive on Friday morning.
A record 22.6 million brackets were filled out on ESPN’s site, up 15% over last year, with some of the early results knocking out millions. Mississippi State’s 69-51 loss to Michigan State and Brigham Young’s 71-67 loss to Duquesne each took out more than 9 million brackets. The biggest upset of the first day, third-seeded Kentucky’s 80-76 loss to Oakland, also did some damage: The third-seeded Wildcats were picked in 95% of brackets in the ESPN Tournament Challenge to beat the 14th-seeded Golden Grizzlies.
At the NCAA’s official site, March Madness Live, only 0.004% of brackets survived after Friday’s early games.
Last year, when there were victories by No. 15 seed Princeton and No. 13 seed Furman on the first day, the last remaining perfect brackets fell on top-seeded Purdue’s loss to Fairleigh Dickinson — just the second No. 16 seed to beat a No. 1 seed in tournament history.
In the women’s tournament, which started on Friday, ESPN’s bracket challenge had more than 3 million entries — about 14% of the number of men’s brackets — with 1.5 million of them going out on Middle Tennessee’s victory over Louisville and 1.3 million taken out when Michigan State lost to North Carolina. Only 172,278 remained after the first five results.
