Teen picked Villanova and only had 3 wrong picks in her NCAA bracket – MarketWatch
Rebecca Gentry doesn’t watch much basketball. But the senior at Jasper High School in southern Indiana managed to fill out a March Madness bracket that hoops fans can only dream of.
She didn’t predict Northern Iowa beating Texas, Hawaii topping California or North Carolina triumphing over Syracuse.
But she got every single other pick right.
That’s according to media reports citing a bracket that she handed into her English lit teacher as part of a class contest.
Dubois County Herald Her bracket appears above, as seen in a Dubois County Herald article that first reported Gentry’s success. The teen, who has described herself as “not really a sports person,” has since been featured in reports by NCAA.com, The Indianapolis Star and local TV news.
I spoke with @JasperWildcats senior Rebecca Gentry about her near perfect bracket. The story at 9 on FOX44… pic.twitter.com/TDoUpjNa3Q
— Andrew Keesee (@AKeesee44News) April 5, 2016
“I like the sport, but I’ll probably never be the definition of a basketball fan,” Gentry told one local TV news outlet. “Do we even have a basketball at our house?”
Villanova’s game-winning shot in NCAA finals
Villanova beats North Carolina 77-74 in a thrilling buzzer-beater. Watch the last 30 seconds of the NCAA championship game.
Gentry appears to attribute her success to luck — and not being burdened by being a college basketball know-it-all.
“It was a little bit of instinct, a little bit of guessing,” she told NCAA.com. “And pure luck. I had no idea what was going on half the time with my bracket.”
Her bracket was not that far from perfect. The odds of getting a perfect bracket, not taking into account knowledge of college basketball, are “widely accepted to be 1 in 9.2 quintillion or 1 in 9,220,000,000,000,000,000,” said Rory Scott from bookmaker Paddy Power in an email to MarketWatch. A DePaul math professor has delved into this subject.
