March Madness isn’t just about basketball. It’s about buzzer-beaters, Cinderella stories and watching your bracket go up in flames by tip-off on the first day. But some basketball fans have convinced themselves they can outsmart the madness by filling out multiple brackets, hedging their bets like they’re on Wall Street.

Let’s be clear: that’s coward behavior.

I asked my buddy how far they think Michigan State is going to go. I got an answer like, “Well, in one bracket I have them winning it all, in another I have them making the Final Four, this one they bounce out in the Round of 32, and in thi—” Whoa. Slow down there, partner.

I asked where you think they’ll end up, and you gave me eight different answers. Do they replay the tournament eight different times? No. Then why are you doing eight different brackets?

You get one bracket. One prediction. A hunch. That’s it.

People who fill out upwards of the 25-bracket limit on the ESPN app are just asking to be made fun of. There’s some belief with these bracket bros that the more brackets you fill out, the better chance you have at getting it perfect.

Technically, sure. But let’s do some math instead of relying on whatever twisted logic is fueling that mindset.

According to the NCAA, if you blindly flip a coin for every single game, your odds of creating a perfect bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion (that’s 9,223,372,036,854,775,808). Obviously, this includes the wildly impossible scenarios, like all four No. 16 seeds making the Final Four. If we account for actual college basketball knowledge — which, let’s be honest, a lot of people suddenly pretend to have this time of year — the odds shift to about 1 in 120 billion.

In 2023, about 56 million Americans filled out at least one March Madness bracket, according to the American Gaming Association. Just for the sake of an unrealistic hypothetical, let’s say those 56 million Americans really did their research and made 10 brackets each. That’s 560 million brackets total — about 22 times more than what was filled out on the ESPN app this year. All taken seriously. All with at least some level of basketball knowledge. All with the intention of being perfect.

Even with everyone devoting their early spring to college basketball in this far fetched, impossible and inconceivably stupid scenario, it would still take about 214 years for someone to get a perfect bracket.

Two hundred and fourteen years. Two full centuries. And that’s under ideal, mathematically absurd circumstances.

At this rate, I’m not even sure humanity makes it another 214 years, let alone the NCAA.

But here’s the thing — it’s not about getting a perfect bracket. No one is getting a perfect bracket. Ever. It will never happen. I’m sorry, but that’s just the truth.

The real problem is this weird hedge people do with multiple brackets. You fill out 10, 20, 30 different ones just to cover a majority of plausible outcomes. Then, when one of your brackets is actually doing well, you pretend you saw it coming the whole time.

No, you didn’t. You threw every possible outcome at the wall, and by sheer probability, one of them stuck. That’s not predicting anything. That’s just playing the numbers game until you get to claim victory.

That’s why one bracket is the only way.

Filling out one bracket forces you to make real decisions. You have to commit to that 12-seed Cinderella story you love. You have to decide if that blue-blood program is actually primed for a run or if they’re going to flame out early. You have to stick to your gut, your research, or just blind faith in a random mascot, team manager or courtside nun. But once you put it down, that’s it. No take-backs. No do-overs. No safety nets.

And when your bracket inevitably gets shattered by a six-foot white graduate and future accountant on a mid-major you never heard of, you embrace the chaos. That’s the point. That’s madness.

So next time someone asks who you have in the Final Four, give them one answer. Because you only get one bracket.