COLUMBUS — A Columbus man has the last remaining perfect bracket out of tens of millions filled out for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
Gregg Nigl, 40, is 48-for-48, correctly predicating every single game through the first two rounds of the tournament. The odds of having a perfect bracket at this point are about 1 in 281 trillion.
According to NCAA.com, the longest streak they have seen on their official brackets has been 39 games in a row.
When Nigl, a neuropsychologist who lives in Columbus, first spoke to NCAA.com writers this week, he didn’t even realize his bracket was perfect.
“This seems kind of unreal. How do I know that this is, you know, real?” he asked.
The NCAA.com writer told him to go to the website. He did, and found his bracket, named “center road” was on the front page.
Nigl told NCAA.com about his strategy for filling out brackets.
“I always watch Bracketology, I listen to them, take into account what they say,” he said. “And then, honestly, sometimes it’s which teams I like better. Some cities I like better, some teams I like better, some coaches I like better. I do look at the rankings too. It’s a combination of things. Don’t get me wrong, a bunch of this is luck. I know that. I’m not going to say I knew every matchup by any means.”
Nigl (and the rest of us) have 15 games to go in the tournament. If he somehow continues his perfect streak, Nigl will have beaten insurmountable odds. The odds of perfectly guessing every game in a bracket are roughly 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
