March Madness: An eighth grader from Pittsburgh is all alone with a perfect women’s NCAA bracket

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.

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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.

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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.

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But unlike Schellhamer, most people have some basketball knowledge. Factor that into the equation, Bergen wrote in 2013,…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/march-madness-eighth-grader-pittsburgh-210535309.html

Author : DAVE SKRETTA

Publish date : 2026-03-25 21:05:00

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