UCLA women’s basketball’s 72-65 victory over LSU in the Elite Eight of the 2025 NCAA Tournament did more than just send the Bruins to the first Final Four in program history.
It ended the dreams that remained for a perfect bracket.
Heading into Sunday’s women’s Elite Eight games, there was one bracket remaining in the ESPN Tournament Challenge (out of 3.4 million) that had correctly picked the previous 57 games, but it had the No. 3 seed Tigers knocking off UCLA, the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed.
For years, the idea of a bracket with no incorrect predictions has existed as something of a pipe dream. The likelihood of correctly picking 67 games is virtually a statistical impossibility, with the NCAA putting the odds of achieving it at one in 120 billion.
For a brief moment, it appeared as though the inconceivable could become a reality. Not only had the bracket correctly guessed all the previous winners, but it had selected the favored team in eight of the nine remaining matchups.
It’s the second consecutive year that a women’s tournament bracket has gotten tantalizing close to perfection. During the 2024 NCAA Tournament, a bracket correctly predicted the first 50 games until No. 3 seed NC State beat No. 2 seed Stanford in the Sweet 16.