The tournament has only just begun, and certainly no numbers on handle have been released, but already there are indications that the 2022 March Madness tournament is going to be a record breaker.
ESPN’s Men’s Tournament Challenge is a free-to-play app which allows players to predict the outcome of March Madness and it was the top overall free app on the App Store, beating out such perennial favorites as TicTok, YouTube and Instagram.
With all of these free downloads come an excess of predictions: 17.3 million brackets have been completed, which is the most since 2019, when 17.2 million were completed.
Additionally, the Men’s Tournament Challenge set daily records this week in terms of sign-ups on both Tuesday and Wednesday. At the height of the morning rush, the app was seeing over 30,000 brackets a minute get registered.
One can garner something from this excess of data: the Men’s Tournament Challenge ‘People’s Bracket’ is a reflection of what fans pick throughout the tournament. From this, we know that more fans chose Arizona, Gonzaga and Kansas as No. 1 seeds to reach the Final Four than any other team.
The top five Men’s Tournament Challenge group are, in order: ESPNLA Bracket Challenge 2022 and McDonald’s x TC Group (both with over 300,000 brackets), followed by Jay Bilas’ Group (over 200,000), and then Automated Madness and Joe Lunardi’s Group (with over 100,000).
The 83rd iteration of this tournament has already commenced. The final is due to be held on April 4 in New Orleans.
