Charles Barkley takes subtle dig at former U.S. President Barack Obama's March Madness bracket: "He's just copying off someone else's paper"

Even presidents are not spared from the mania that grips the nation during March Madness, and former U.S. President Barack Obama has publicly shared his brackets for the Big Dance since he took office 15 years ago.

Obama picked the reigning champions, the UConn Huskies, to retain their title in a win over John Calipari's Kentucky Wildcats, a prediction that fell flat when Kentucky was stunned 80-76 by the Oakland Golden Grizzlies in the first round.

His women's basketball prediction was a clash from last year's Final Four, picking Dawn Staley's unbeaten South Carolina Gamecocks to beat record-breaker Caitlin Clark's Iowa Hawkeyes in the championship game.

TNT host Charles Barkley recently took a subtle dig at Barack Obama on the CNN show "King Charles" for his bracket.

“He went with the traditional pick, everyone is picking UConn […] so he’s just copying off someone else’s paper,” Barkley said. “See, he just went chalk. He picked South Carolina because everybody in the world picks South Carolina.”

Barkley did not finish his digs on the former president taking a shot at people who come up with multiple brackets for March Madness as well.

“I only fill out one. All those other fools be filling out like five. That’s one of the 10 commandments: you only get one bracket. One bracket, fools,” he said.

Has anyone ever picked a perfect March Madness bracket?

Millions of hoops fans all over the country and the world try to pick the perfect bracket, where they try to predict the winner of the 64 matches during March Madness, a thankless task considering the upsets that litter the tournament.

According to a CNN Report from last year involving Davidson College professor of mathematics and computer science Joseph Morton and visiting professor at the US National Museum of Mathematics, Tim Chartier, the odds are astronomical.

The odds of predicting all March Madness games correctly stand at a mammoth one to nine quintillion (18 zeroes).

“So you have better odds of winning the Powerball with two consecutive tickets than getting a perfect bracket,” Chartier said (via CNN). “You’ve better odds that a family of four will all get hit by lightning in their lifetime than picking a perfect bracket.

“There is a stat out there that there’s a one in 10,000 chance that you get injured by a toilet. So there are better odds that that same family of four all get injured by the toilet than picking a perfect bracket.”

In 2019, Gregg Nigl, an Ohio neuropsychologist, came closest to achieving the impossible by correctly guessing the first 49 games of March Madness.

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