What is the average score of the March Madness final? Total combined points for your bracket tie breaker | Bracketology

If you’re wondering how to take on your bracket tiebreaker then don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with the average final score of March Madness games. That way, you can be prepared for whatever goes down in the big dance.

What’s the average score of March Madness games?

We get it. March Madness is here and you’re not sure how to fill out your bracket when it comes to the tiebreaker for the final score of the championship game. According to the last ten finals, the average score of the NCAA Tournament championship game is 142 total points (rounding up from 141.6) since the 2015 NCAA tournament final.

It is worth noting that the score 135 was the total points in the 2024 and 2023 finals and 141 hit in 2018 and 2022.

There are a lot of factors to consider: overtime, low scoring games, high scoring games, but that the reason we’re going with the most recent data and we’ll stick to 142 points, which is the average over the last 10 years.

Total combined score of 142 points

While it would be logical to think that 142 is the number you should use for your tiebreaker, the context here is worth nothing. The average was calculated using scores from games that had lopsided results - blowouts so to speak. As you can imagine, such results skew the averages.

This is all to say, it would probably be a better idea to base your tiebreaker on the team you have playing in the big game. If that isn’t clear enough, you can think of it like this: If you’ve got two offensive-minded teams in the final game, you can expect a higher score than if you’ve got two who are known for being stingy on defense. That being said, there’s no definitive proof that 72-70 won’t work or any other variant of 142 points.

As we all know, March Madness is just that, it’s craziness, and we’ll all have to tune in to see what teams get upset and who the Cinderella story is in 2026.

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