March Madness: Only 116 brackets are still perfect after Thursday's games

The dream of the perfect chip for all but a select few is already over.

With several NCAA Tournament games still gearing up for Thursday, most of the brackets have already been broken. Only 3% of brackets filled out through Yahoo Sports were still perfect during the early flurry of games Thursday afternoon, and that number dropped to 0.1% after No. 14 Oakland beat No. 3 Kentucky on Thursday night.

By the time all of Thursday's matches were over, there were only 116 brackets still perfect.

The biggest drop of the day came after No. 11 Duquesne pulled off a 71-67 upset win over No. 6 BYU. The win was the Dukes' first in the tournament since 1969. Just over 75% of brackets have BYU qualifying in the first round, so that game alone took most out. Duquesne will next face No. 3 Illinois in the second round after the Illini cruise past Morehead State.

The first game took down a lot of the brackets as well. Tom Izzo and No. 9 Michigan State rolled over No. 8 Mississippi State, 69-51, to open play Thursday afternoon. It marked Izzo's 20th first-round win in the tournament and set up a battle between the Spartans and top-seeded North Carolina — which passed No. 16 Wagner in a first-round game. About 35% of brackets had the Bulldogs advancing in the first round.

No. 11 Oregon beat No. 6 South Carolina 87-73 in a first-round game, cutting the remaining perfect brackets in half to about 7%. No. 7 Dayton then came back from a 17-point gap in the second half to defeat No. 10 Nevada, cutting the remaining field of perfect brackets to just 2.96%. Just over 44.5% of the perfect brackets at that point were Dayton wins over Nevada.

The other three games from the early wave — Creighton's win over Akron, Arizona's win over Long Beach State, and North Carolina's win over Wagner — were chosen correctly by more than 90% of users.

Texas beat Colorado State 56-44 on Thursday night, cutting the remaining perfect brackets to just 2.1%. Then it was Oakland's massive win over Kentucky that really snapped the remaining perfect brackets. Oakland stunned the Wildcats with a historic Jack Gohlke performance to pull off an 80-76 upset win. It is the first time in program history that the Golden Grizzlies have reached the second round of the tournament. About 96% of users chose Kentucky to advance to the second round. This left us with only 0.1% of the brackets that remained perfect.

By the end of the night, after Kansas and Washington State beat Samford and Drake, respectively, only 116 perfect brackets remained.

There is still plenty of basketball to be played during the rest of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. But at the pace we're already going, we're not likely to have many perfect brackets, if any at all, by the end of the first round.