I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to make me a March Madness bracket — only one blew me away

Both, though, are calling it for Arizona to win the NCAA tournament

20 Mar 2026, 10:44 · TechRadar

Features By Lance Ulanoff published 20 March 2026

(Image credit: Getty Images)

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I'm not a college basketball fan, but when the NCAA tournament rolls around — aka March Madness — my interest grows, mostly around making the celebrated Bracket.

How to watch March Madness 2026 for free if you're outside the US

Brackets are basically a way of tracking the dozens of teams, games, rounds, winners, and losers to a final championship game roughly three weeks from now. Each match-up results in a winner who goes on to the next round and meets the winner of another matchup (in the early rounds, they're facing off against regional conference rivals), a process that continues winnowing losing teams until there are just two left.

In the US, it seems like everyone is in a pool, filling out brackets in the hope that they can guess the winners and losers and walk away with bragging rights or a pool prize (usually monetary); Apple Sports has also got in on the bracket action. How people cook up their brackets varies widely. Some follow college sports closely enough to have a good idea of which team(s) might triumph. I am not one of those people — I'm not even a casual college hoops fan.

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It's reasonable to assume these days that some people are using AI to build their brackets, and I wondered if I could do the same. With the tournament kicking off on March 19 (and running through April 6), I was too late to build one and submit it to a pool; but as an exercise, I could see if AI game, rounds, and championship selections were any better than my dead reckoning.

I built a prompt and fed it into ChatGPT Plus and Gemini Pro. In each case, I chose the 'Thinking' mode and, as you can see, I encouraged the AI to take its time.

Here's the prompt:

"I'd love to see the optimal NCAA tournament bracket, one that has the best chance of coming true. Don't rush on this. Consider records (season, historical), external factors (any you think are relevant). I want to see the whole bracket and, if possible, be able to click on a game or round to see your reasoning."

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