Chicago Teenager Claims Bracket Perfection

Alex Herrmann, an autistic 17 year old from Chicago, has what may be the only perfect bracket in America through the Bracket Manager at CBSSports as has been highly reported today. Herrmann's so far perfect bracket was not entered in a prize winning contest so there is no reward for his predictions which have been estimated at odds of 13,460,000-1; yahoo.com were offering $1 million for a perfect bracket and sportsbook.com a more generous $13 million. However, there is still plenty of opportunity for him to cash in since his predicted winner (Purdue over Kansas State in the national final) is listed at +6087 with Pinnacle.

ESPN had 4.78 million bracket entries and just under 43% of them had the Kansas Jayhawks to win it all. Also bowing out early have been #2 Villanova and a pair of #3 seeds in Georgetown and Pittsburgh leaving no perfect brackets at ESPN and out of the close to 5 million entries, there are only a total of four who have 15 of the 16 remaining teams.

However, the incredibly rare statistical occurrence of Herrmann's bracket has been questioned. CBSSports had no record of the bracket since it doesn't track the brackets submitted to their Bracket Manager program and also it does appear to let players change their picks after the start of the tournament to some degree. However, Herrmann's mother said he didn't cheat so that's good enough for me.

The bracket can be seen below by clicking on the thumbnail below: