One Man Still Has Perfect March Madness Bracket

There’s only one perfect March Madness bracket remaining in the world.

As the annual basketball tournament heads into the Sweet 16, the NCAA says that Gregg Nigl of Columbus, Ohio, is the only person who still has a perfect bracket, guessing 48 out of the 48 games correctly.

According to the NCAA, the 48-game streak is the longest ever, crushing the previous record of 39 games.

Nigl, 40, only found out about his bracket when the NCAA called him to tell him.

“We couldn’t believe it. My wife [Casandra] was sitting next to me, and I had it on speaker phone,” Nigl told the Columbus Dispatch. “I kept asking, ‘How do I know this is not a joke?’ ”

Nigl told the NCAA that even though he’s been filling out brackets for “10 to 15 years” and had filled out three other brackets for this year’s tournament, he “almost” didn’t fill his record-breaking bracket out because he was sick hours before the deadline to submit.

“I almost didn’t fill that one out, because I was actually sick… I filled it out Thursday morning, right before the deadline, and I almost didn’t do it,” he said. “I almost went back to bed and didn’t fill it out, but I did it anyway because I felt bad because it was my friend’s [group].”

About his strategy, Nigl told the NCAA he used a “combination of things.”

“Sometimes it’s which teams I like better. Some cities I like better, some teams I like better, some coaches I like better,” he said. “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.”According to the NCAA, if you treat each game as a 50/50 toss-up, the odds of creating a perfect bracket throughout the whole tournament are 1 in 9.2 quintillion (a quintillion is one billion billions).

On whether or not his bracket will stay perfect, Nigl told the Dispatch: “I’m not very confident that it will stay that way. But anything can happen.”

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