NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

The 2025 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is in full swing. This is a tournament that starts with 68 teams and slowly works its way down to 1 final champion. The “First Four” started on March 18 and the National Championship will be on April 7.

One of the popular things to do with the tournament is to make a bracket to predict which team will win each game. The goal is to get every single pick correct and get a perfect bracket. However, that has never happened and probably will never happen.

The odds of that are so small that Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, has even come out and said that he will give one billion dollars to the first person with a perfect bracket.

With a perfect bracket being so rare, Buffet changed it to just getting the first couple of rounds correct for a million dollars. He said in an interview, “I want to give away a million dollars to somebody while I’m still around as chairman.”

There are many other smaller bracket challenges, with the purpose of seeing who can gets the most correct picks in the tournament. One is even happening right now on our campus.

Sophomore Austin Whitney is hosting a bracket challenge that has a total of 27 participants. Whitney says he “wanted to create an opportunity for students to engage with each other in a fun and competitive way.” The winner will get a $15 Amazon gift card.

After the first two rounds of the tournament, junior Garett Gee was leading the UO bracket challenge. He said that he doesn’t even really pay attention to basketball throughout the year but enjoys doing the bracket.

“I was with my Adelphic brothers, and we filled our brackets out at the same time. I got a lot of knowledge from them.” Now, after the first 4 rounds, Gee has dropped to 10th place.

Written by Logan Walton