And then there were none: Upsets end chase for perfect bracket on Day 2

The chase for the perfect March Madness bracket will have to wait another year. Again.

In a men’s tournament that saw a 2 and a 4 seed lose on Day 1, only a relative handful of brackets were still intact in the biggest contests when 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson took the floor against Purdue. The Knights stunned the top-seeded Boilermakers Friday night, sending the remaining perfect brackets into trash cans everywhere.

On the CBS Sports site, 0.0003 percent of brackets were perfect through the eight early Friday games, according to Jared Shanker, the network’s senior director of digital communications. A few hours later, the network tweeted that “March is for busted brackets “in describing the goose egg.

Consider that 98.7 percent of CBS brackets selected Purdue to defeat FDU while just 0.4 percent picked FDU to reach the Sweet 16. The network said 38.4 percent had Purdue in the Final Four and 8.8 percent had the Boilermakers winning the national championship.

No perfection for ESPN’s

Tournament Challenge bracket game, either; only 22 brackets out of more than 20 million filled out were still perfect earlier Friday and they vanished as the games wrapped up.

Ditto for NCAA March Madness. None left, out of unspecified millions.

Victories by double-digit seeds Princeton, Penn State and Furman on Thursday did particular damage. Only 1.4 percent of ESPN’s brackets had all three teams making it out of the first round, and only 0.1 percent had them surviving the weekend. Fairleigh Dickinson delivered the final blow.