March Madness Update: No Cinderellas, No Perfect Brackets, Barack Obama Gets 10 Sweet 16 Correct
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Zinger Key Points
  • Barack Obama continues his March Madness tradition of filling out a bracket.
  • The Sweet 16 is mostly top ranked teams with minimal upsets in the first two rounds.

The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is down to sixteen teams competing for the championship. While this year's tournament doesn't have any Cinderella stories, there is once again no perfect bracket.

Minimal Upsets, No Perfection: The quest to have a perfect bracket comes with odds of 1 in 9.2 quintillion, which prompted Warren Buffett to change the rules for a $1 million payout in his employee contest.

The 2025 tournament saw minimal first-round upsets and has only one double-digit seed in the Sweet 16. This is also the first time all the remaining teams in the Sweet 16 have come from power conferences.

Despite the high level of favorites winning, the last perfect bracket got a selection wrong on Sunday with Illinois losing to Kentucky. This means a bracket was perfect up until game 43 of the 63-game tournament.

While there weren't any perfect brackets, Buffett's employee pool had 12 people correctly predict 31 of the first 32 games of the tournament. One person will take home $1 million for having the perfect bracket the longest, with another 11 employees taking home $100,000 each for correctly predicting 31 of the first 32 games correctly but having a miss earlier than the champion.

The closest a bracket came to perfection was in 2019, when an Ohio neuropsychologist picked games correctly through the first 49 games. Gregg Nigl’s bracket marked the first time someone correctly predicted the games through the Sweet 16 and is the longest perfect bracket of all time.

A look at the remaining Sweet 16 teams shows minimal teams outside the top four seeds in each region. All four one-seeds remain with three of the two-seeds, two three-seeds and three four-seeds. Outside of the top four seeds in each region, there are two six-seeds, one five-seed and one 10-seed remaining.

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Betting Odds: With 16 teams remaining, here are the current betting odds from DraftKings Inc DKNG to win the national championship, with their seed in parentheses:

  • Duke (1): +210
  • Florida (1): +350
  • Houston (1): +500
  • Auburn (1): +500
  • Tennessee (2): +1,700
  • Texas Tech (3): +1,800
  • Alabama (2): +1,800
  • Michigan State (2): +2,200
  • Maryland (4): +3,500
  • Arizona (4): +3,500
  • Kentucky (3): +5,500
  • BYU (6): +6,000
  • Michigan (5): +7,000
  • Purdue (4): +7,500
  • Ole Miss (6): +7,500
  • Arkansas (10): +10,000

As a reminder, Benzinga shared one of the stats that bettors may want to know when picking a winner in the tournament.

Dating back to 1999, Ken Pomeroy has provided basketball rankings known as KenPom that take into account offensive and defensive efficiencies and also predicts which teams would win in matchups.

Since 2002, all the teams that have won the National Championship have ranked in the top 25 and top 40 adjusted defensive efficiency based on the KenPom rankings.

That narrows down this year’s list to the following teams, with their respective seeds and betting odds at the start of the tournament:

  • Houston (1): +600
  • Tennessee (2): +2,200
  • Duke (1): +320
  • Michigan State (2): +2,500
  • Maryland (4): +4,500
  • Florida (1): +380
  • Iowa State (3): +4,500
  • Auburn (1): +400
  • Clemson (5): +8,000
  • UCLA (7): +15,000
  • Louisville (8): +10,000
  • Mississippi (6): +16,000

Of the teams listed above, Iowa State, Clemson, UCLA and Louisville lost and are out.

Since 2002, all but two teams that won the championship ranked among the top 20 adjusted offensive efficiency and top 20 adjusted defensive efficiency teams based on the KenPom rankings.

This would keep only the following teams in the running:

  • Houston: 2nd defensive, 10th offensive
  • Tennessee: 3rd defensive, 18th offensive
  • Duke: 4th defensive, 3rd offensive
  • Florida: 9th defensive, 1st offensive
  • Auburn: 12th defensive, 2nd offensive

Surprisingly enough, all five of these teams that fit the criteria are still in the tournament.

Barack Obama's Bracket: For many years, the president of the United States filled out a bracket and picked a winner. Barack Obama started the tradition, but Donald Trump did not follow it. Joe Biden later followed the tradition.

While he's no longer in the White House, Obama continues the tradition, sharing his bracket on social media annually.

Obama's Final 4 picks of Auburn, Florida, Duke and Tennessee all remain in place. A parlay on all four making the Final 4 pays out odds of +1,394. The former president correctly picked 10 of the Sweet 16 teams that remain.

Last year, Obama correctly predicted Connecticut and Purdue would make the Final 4. He and Biden also correctly predicted that Connecticut would win last year's national championship.

Obama predicts Duke will win the championship game over Florida this year. And he’s not alone. Duke was the most popular championship bet at DraftKings ahead of the tournament and the most popular winner in the ESPN Tournament Challenge bracket contest.

What's Next: The next round of games kicks off Thursday night with four games on Thursday and four games on Friday to decide the Elite 8 who will play on Saturday and Sunday.

Paramount Global PARAPARAA and Warner Bros. Discovery WBD share media rights for Thursday and Friday, with games airing on CBS and TBS respectively.

Viewership for the first day of March Madness averaged 9.1 million per game window, as reported by FrontOfficeSports, hitting record highs.

CBS has the rights to this year's Final Four games on Saturday, April 5 and the national championship game on Monday, April 7.

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Photo: Shutterstock

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