Autistic teen heads toward perfect record in predicting NCAA Tournament winners

From the New York Post:

Through the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, Alex Hermann says he has correctly predicted the winners of all 48 games played so far.

"It's amazing," he told NBCChicago.com

But is it too good to be true?

Hermann, a 17-year-old with autism from Chicago's suburbs, submitted his bracket, with the help of his 24-year-old brother Andrew, to CBSSports.com's Bracket Manager game.

But unlike the Web site's public Bracket Challenge game, which locked at noon March 18 before the tournament began, the private games aren't monitored by the site, because picks can be changed after it has started.

"Because of that reason, we don't monitor the results of the Bracket Manager," CBSSports.com spokesperson Alex Riethmiller said.

Hermann's bracket has every game correct -- Northern Iowa's shock of Kansas, the consensus pick to win the national championship; Ohio's stunning first-round victory of Georgetown; and St. Mary's upset of Villanova.

"I watched each team this year and saw the size of the player and looked at the stats," Hermann told NBCChicago.com, asked how he picked the games.

National results would indicate that Hermann's feat would be extroardinary. ESPN said there were no perfect brackets from the 4.78 million entered in its bracket challenge. The ESPN leader has four wrong picks, and had Kansas advancing to the Elite Eight.

Riethmiller said that he thought the best bracket in the Bracket Challenge had four incorrect picks as well, with Kansas as its winner. Because Andrew went to Purdue, Hermann has the Boilermakers as his champion.