Overview
- Otto Schellhammer of suburban Pittsburgh is 48-0 in ESPN’s women’s Tournament Challenge following Monday’s second-round games, with his locked bracket leaving 15 picks and Texas as his champion.
- The NCAA, which tracks seven large contests, counted about 36 million men’s entries and 5.2 million women’s entries, putting his run at roughly one in 41.2 million among those pools.
- Perfect women’s brackets across the major contests fell from 235 to seven after Virginia beat Iowa in double overtime Monday, then to one when Notre Dame knocked off Ohio State.
- Schellhammer, an eighth grader, says his streak is 100% luck and that he knows little about basketball, though his mom says the run has him watching the women’s tournament now.
- Mathematician Jeffrey Bergen has estimated a true 63-0 bracket at 1 in 9.2 quintillion under coin-flip odds and about 1 in 28 billion when accounting for team strength.