The only perfect bracket left after the opening weekend of the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments — from more than 40 million entries across all the major contests — was produced not by some college basketball expert or betting guru but an eighth grader from suburban Pittsburgh.
His name is Otto Schellhammer. He is 14 years old.
And despite his perfect-so-far women’s bracket, he admits to knowing nothing about hoops.
“I know people say this a lot about March Madness,” Schellhammer told The Associated Press, sitting beside his mom, Amy, between school and lacrosse practice on Wednesday, “but it was 100% luck. I know basically nothing about any type of basketball.
“I play with my friends,” he added, “but I don’t really watch it.”
Oh, he’ll be watching now. Schellhammer has correctly picked the first 48 women’s games in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge, leaving him just 15 away from perfection. He has Texas cutting down the nets on April 5 in Phoenix.
While it’s impossible to know whether there are any other perfect brackets in millions of smaller pools all across the country, the NCAA has tracked seven of the largest contests for years, said Mike Benzie, the senior director of content for NCAA Digital. This year they totaled about 36 million men’s entries and 5.2 on the women’s side, which means Schellhammer’s is better than one-in-a-million.
He’s one in 41.2 million.
“I think it’s absolutely hilarious,” said Amy Schellhammer, who actually did play high school ball. “It’s just so fun to see. It’s exciting. I’m excited he’s into women’s basketball now. He’s been watching and it’s making him more excited about it.”
Most people have heard that picking a perfect bracket is harder than winning the lottery, but exactly how hard is it? The late DePaul mathematics professor Jeffrey Bergen calculated the odds at 1 in 9.2 quintillion, assuming every game is a 50-50 proposition, or about 46 million times the number of stars in our galaxy.
But unlike Schellhamer, most people have some basketball knowledge. Factor that into the equation, Bergen wrote in 2013, and the odds of going 63-0 drop to about 1 in 28 billion — or, roughly 96 times harder than winning the Powerball jackpot.
“Even in the women’s tournament where the favorites predominantly advance, there are outliers, and it only takes one if your bracket leans into favorites,” said Charlie Creme, the resident women’s bracketologist for ESPN. “Being able to pinpoint just those two or three upsets, knowing they will happen, but just in such a small number, is the maddening part of perfection.”
In the ESPN competition, the quest for a perfect men’s bracket ended Sunday night when No. 6 seed Tennessee beat third-seeded Virginia 79-72 in the 44th game of the tournament. (If that hadn’t done it, surely No. 9 seed Iowa’s upset of No. 1 seed and defending national champ Florida later that night would have taken care of anybody else).
Still, that run of 43 consecutive winning picks broke the record on the ESPN platform for its men’s contest.
On the women’s side, the NCAA found 235 perfect brackets among the major contests going into Monday, when the last games in the second round were played. That number fell to seven when No. 10 seed Virginia beat second-seeded Iowa in double overtime. When No. 6 seed Notre Dame knocked off third-seeded Ohio State, Schellhammer was the last one left.
“The first game I watched of March Madness was on Monday,” Schellhammer said. “I came home and I was like, ‘I’ll check and see how my women’s bracket is doing.’ Then I watched Virginia beat Iowa, and that was pretty cool. And then I watched Notre Dame.”
Schellhammer still has a long way to go: The best start in the ESPN women’s competition is 57 correct picks, which happened last year. To beat that, he would need to win each of the Sweet 16 games on Friday and Saturday to reach 56-0, and then win the first two games in the Elite Eight starting Sunday — though at that point, why not just win ’em all?
Schellhammer mostly stuck with the favorites in the opening weekend, though picking Virginia to beat Iowa was a big upset.
He’s sticking with the favorites through the Sweet 16, too, but then Schellhammer is going out on a mighty long limb: He predicts No. 3 seed TCU will beat the Cavaliers on Saturday night, then knock off No. 1 seed South Carolina, the three-time national champions and the fourth-biggest favorite to win the title again, according to odds from BetMGM Sportsbook.
Even if Schellhammer wanted to, there’s no turning back now. His bracket is locked.
“TCU and South Carolina is definitely one I would probably go back, and not to knock Texas but I’d probably re-pick the championship, because UConn is a powerhouse,” he said. “You never know. If there’s ever going to be an upset it’s going to be in March Madness.”
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AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness
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