March Madness: Just 1 perfect women's bracket remains after Sunday upsets

After a chalky first round left 57 perfect brackets remaining in Yahoo's women's bracket contest, we are down to just one.

In Sunday's early game, No. 7 Duke beat No. 2 Ohio State to advance to the Sweet 16, cutting the perfect bracket field down to four. South Carolina then beat North Carolina to reduce the field to three before No. 5 Colorado's win over No. 4 Kansas State reduced the field to two.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, Oregon State's win over Nebraska reduced the field to just one. The perfect bracket just survived the day, too, thanks to an overtime win from Stanford on Sunday night. That entry — trisdyn's Rad Bracket — has South Carolina beating Iowa by a score of 90-88 in the national championship. A second entry had picked all the games correctly up to that point, but failed to enter a tiebreaker final score in its national championship pick.

Lack of early upsets keeps perfect brackets alive

The field was whittled down to its last few Sunday after a handful of entries survived the first round. The second day of play on Saturday started with just 0.3% of entries in Yahoo's bracket contest left fully intact. Saturday's early slate of games didn't produce any upsets. Favorites UConn, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, NC State, Notre Dame and Kansas all advanced.

The results were enough to knock out all but 0.1% of the remaining perfect women's brackets.

By the time No. 7 Ole Miss beat No. 10 Marquette and No. 1 USC beat No. 16 Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, only 102 perfect brackets remained.

Wins by UCLA and West Virginia dropped the tally to 70. Gonzaga's win over UC Irvine dropped the number to 59. UCLA's win over Cal Baptist and Utah's win over South Dakota State each knocked out another bracket, bringing the total down to 57 Saturday night.

A first round that produced just one upset allowed those 57 perfect brackets to survive to the second round. But the second round started with an upset to whittle the field down to the last few.

Men's perfect brackets eliminated early

On Friday, No. 13 seed Yale's upset of fourth-seeded Auburn torched the final remaining perfect men's bracket. One had remained after No. 10 Colorado's win over No. 7 Florida knocked out 12 of the then-remaining 13 perfect brackets.

The perfect men's bracket pool had previously been whittled down to 0.1% of entries on Thursday when No. 14 seed Oakland toppled No. 3 seed Kentucky in the biggest upset of the tournament.