Purdue ruined the last perfect thing we had left.
Credit to the third-seeded Boilermakers for their overtime win over No. 2-seed Tennessee on Thursday night in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, but their victory shattered the last perfect March Madness bracket, which lasted an astounding 49 games.
Ohio neuropsychologist Gregg Nigl, 40, picked the tournament’s first 49 games correctly, 10 games longer than any unblemished bracket has ever lasted, NCAA.com reported. (Granted, they’ve only been tracking the nation’s major online brackets — from ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, Fox, Sports Illustrated and NCAA.com — for four years.)
As a point of reference, NCAA.com noted that if every game were a coin toss, the odds of predicting 49 in a row are 1 in 562,949,953,421,312. The odds for a perfect bracket through all 63 tournament games are even more mind-boggling: 1 in 9.2 quintillion.
Nigl had picked Tennessee to advance in Thursday’s Sweet 16 matchup. Earlier in the evening, he correctly picked Gonzaga to advance past Florida State.
