Beyond the Bracket: How FanDuel Reimagines College Basketball Betting
It's a Thursday morning in FanDuel's Jersey City office—but this isn't a typical Thursday. The workspace is packed. Every television displays a different basketball game as trading analysts dart their eyes between screens. It's the first Thursday of the annual college basketball tournament, arguably the most exciting day of the trading team's year.
Three traders are assigned to each game, monitoring and shifting lines in real time across core markets, player props, and futures bets.
“Those first two days in particular, where you have 16 games both days for 12 hours a day, it's just nonstop,” said Senior Sports Trader Jonathon Price.
Americans were projected to wager around $3.1 billion on the men’s and women’s tournaments in 2025, according to the American Gaming Association (AGA). But this phenomenon didn't come solely from the legalization of online sports betting. Its origins date back to the 1970s and the bracket pool, a tradition driven by the near-impossible odds of picking a perfect bracket.
History of the Bracket
A college basketball bracket pool is a competition where participants pick winners for all tournament games, earning points for correct predictions, with the highest point total winning.
The origins of bracket pools are unclear, but it's always thrived on friendly competition and community connection. One early pool started in 1977 at Jody's Club Forest, an Irish pub in Staten Island where 88 people paid $10 to predict the final teams. Another origin story credits a Kentucky man who began organizing full bracket predictions in 1978.
Regardless, for decades, the paper format remained essentially unchanged: pick all 67 games, hope for the best, and wait to see if your bracket survived any upsets.
Perfect Bracket Paradox
The odds of picking a perfect tournament bracket are 1 in 9.2 quintillion, or around 1 in 120.2 billion even for fans making educated guesses, according to the NCAA.
There has never been a verified perfect bracket.
That near-impossibility is precisely what makes bracket pools compelling, but it's also what drove FanDuel to reimagine the experience.
"A lot of that office pool nature—how people want to interact with the tournament generally—is what drove us to cater to that in our product," said Joe Caputo, Trading Manager at FanDuel.
Instead of bettors predicting all 67 games, modern sportsbooks allow them to wager on outcomes where they feel most confident. That flexibility also caters to the social dimension of the college basketball tournament. Friends can compare picks and bet alongside each other in ways that mirror the communal spirit of those original bracket pools.
College Basketball Betting with FanDuel
Caputo was part of the team that launched FanDuel Sportsbook's first in-house college basketball betting model in November 2021. Before that, a third party handled the offering, and options were limited.
Since then, innovation has accelerated rapidly, both in the markets offered and the speed of delivery. FanDuel has added Same Game Parlays (SGP), player props, Live SGPs, Quick Bets, and futures markets—each giving users more ways to customize their college basketball tournament experience.
"We really want to give customers the ability to parlay as many elements of their own bracket as they can," Caputo said.
In practice, this represents a fundamental shift in how people bet on the tournament:
Example: Imagine a customer is filling out a paper bracket for a friendly competition. Out of the entire 67-game field, they feel most confident about three specific picks: Duke winning their region, Texas reaching the Semifinals, and St. John's winning their first-round game. On FanDuel Sportsbook, that customer can parlay only those three selections, disregarding any unrelated matchups.
For 2026, FanDuel has rolled out new grid views and region-specific tabs. Users can now see every team and their odds to reach every single round in one place.
"It's not as static as it used to be," said Caputo. "We want to optimize the site display as best we can to make sure that customers are able to navigate properly."
For one college basketball tournament game, FanDuel offers around 40–50 betting markets. Plus, the sportsbook lists another 25-30 futures markets that adjust throughout the bracket's progression.
At the Traders’ Desk
Back in the Jersey City office, the scale of the operation becomes clear. The trading team has grown around five times its size since 2021—now with over 130 employees globally between North America, Australia, and Europe.
“Back in the day, when the bracket would be released on Sunday, it would take us an hour or two to get everything on the site,” said Jonathon Price. “This year, we'll have everything pre-created, so once we plug in the bracket on Sunday, we could have everything up within minutes."
As sports betting has gained legal status across most states, FanDuel has transformed the casual tradition into a real-time operation that offers customers more flexibility than ever.
Learn more about FanDuel's product innovations here.
Featured image credit: AP Photo/John Mersits
