Legal 2025 March Madness Betting Guide

It’s not a question of “if” there will be an upset in this year’s March Madness, but it’s a question of “when,” and when betting on games after the first round of the NCAA Tournament, things get a bit tricky due to the various combinations of Seed vs Seed matchups you can have. However, this certainly does not mean that we can’t find useful trends to apply before betting.

Below is a breakdown of how many upsets you can expect to see during the tournament on average, including information on which years saw the maximum and the minimum number of upsets from that round.

Total Upsets: 12.2

• Max: 19 (2014)
• Min: 4 (2007)

Round of 64: 6.1

• Max: 10 (2016)
• Min: 2 (2007)

Round of 32: 3.7

• Max: 8 (2000)
• Min: 0 (3 times)

Sweet Sixteen: 1.7

• Max: 4 (1990)
• Min: 0 (5 times)

Elite Eight: 0.5

• Max: 2 (2 times)
• Min: 0 (10 times)

Final Four: 0.2

• Max: 2 (2014)
• Min: 0 (23 times)

From the information, we can gather a ton of vital details. The first being that there are 12.2 upsets (lower seed defeats the higher seed) during March Madness each year, on average.

In fact, the most interesting trend here is that the average number of upsets essentially get halved will each round, starting with 6.1 upsets in the first round, then 3.7 for the second round, 1.7 for the Sweet Sixteen, 0.5 during the Elite Eight, and finally 0.2 for the Final Four.

Since we know that there are 32 games in the Round of 64 for example (2 teams per 1 game), we can divide the number of upsets by the number of games in each round to determine how many upsets you should expect to wager on each year.

• Round of 64: 6.1 upsets / 32 games = 19% (nearly 1 upset per 5 games)
• Round of 32: 3.7 upsets / 16 games = 23.1% (almost 1 upset per 4 games)
• Sweet Sixteen: 1.7 upsets / 8 games = 21.3% (over 1 upset per 5 games)
• Elite Eight: 0.5 upsets / 4 games = 12.5% (exactly 1 upset per 8 games)
• Final Four: 0.2 upsets / 2 games = 10% (exactly 1 upset per 10 games)

Surprisingly, upsets happen more often in the second round than in the first round and accounts for the highest percentage of upset games for a given round in the tournament. Upsets happen in the first round (19%) and the Sweet Sixteen (21.3%) roughly one-fifth of the time.

However, the Elite Eight and the Final Four experience significant drop-off and if you’re someone who likes to bet on the higher seed, then these two rounds are for you since history has been generous to favorites. On average, there is only one upset in the Elite Eight every two years and every 2.5 years for the Final Four. This isn’t too surprising since the tournament has a way of narrowing down the field to where only the best teams remain.

In summary, during the first three rounds, at least 20%-25% of your bets should be on the lower-seeded team to pull off an upset if history is any indication. However, after those three rounds, change strategies and bet only chalk before the Elite Eight and Final Four are played since the higher-seeded teams win 87.5% and 90% of the games in those rounds, respectively. After all, who wouldn’t like to win 9 out of 10 of the bets they place?