March Magic?
If you’ve watched sports in the past couple of years, you’ve likely been introduced to someone named Oz the Mentalist. He’s been included on HBO’s Hard Knocks and ESPN’s College GameDay, and most recently infiltrated the sports world through CBS’ March Madness pre-and-post-game coverage.
Back before the NCAA Tournament even got started, the crew of Ernie Johnson, Clark Kellogg, Kenny Smith, and Charles Barkley welcomed Oz Pearlman (AKA Oz the Mentalist) to do some in-studio magic before the games got rolling. To kick things off, Oz informed the panel that correctly picking the Elite Eight before the games begin had odds of 1 in 24 million.
As you can see the first couple minutes of this video, he chose his Elite Eight, his Final Four picks and the biggest upset of the tournament and sealed it up in an envelope to be opened at a later date:
.@OzTheMentalist putting the MAD in March Madness reading our guys' minds 🤯 pic.twitter.com/VtvJbNlNqd
— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) March 20, 2025
If you watched past the first couple of minutes, 1) I still don’t understand how he does it and 2) it was rather rude of him to put Kenny “The Jet” Smith’s PIN number out there like that.
Anyways, that “later date” came yesterday during CBS’ continuing coverage of the NCAA Tournament. The envelope that was sealed up back on March 20th was cracked open by Oz himself, and he revealed that he chose No. 10 seed Arkansas over No. 2 Seed St. John’s as his “Bracket Buster” game. Oz the Mentalist then showed that he had picked the Elite Eight 100% correctly, and even had the Final Four picks (two of the games had yet to be played):
-Florida will beat Texas Tech
-Duke will beat Alabama
-Houston will beat Tennessee
-Auburn will beat Michigan State
I’ll give him credit for putting his picks out there before Houston and Auburn had even played that day:
.@OzTheMentalist predicted the Elite Eight back on March 20th 🤯
Oz's Final Four:
Florida ✅
Duke ✅
Houston 👀
Auburn 👀 pic.twitter.com/tkkAnXgqfB— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) March 30, 2025
All that being said… why isn’t Oz the Mentalist a sports betting mastermind?
Or at the very least, why didn’t he have a perfect bracket? If he can truly predict all of this stuff, why not put it to good, multi-million-dollar-winning use? Sure, it’s cool to do big TV reveals… but if I were Oz, I’d be using my “gift” to rake in millions of dollars sport betting.
Social media agreed with me, and they also weren’t all that shocked with Oz’s picks, considering his prediction had all of the top-seeded teams reaching the Final Four:
Wow. Chills!!! You mean all the #1 seeds will make it wow
— Brick (@marlbororedddss) March 30, 2025
Let’s see if he bet big on his prediction. Then I’ll be persuaded that he knew the future.
— Joel (@skaggsjw) March 31, 2025
Didn’t Buffet have some challenge that he would give anyone who had a perfect bracket $1b? I guess this guy wasn’t interested in that.
— James (@NC_State69420) March 31, 2025
If he’s so damn good why doesnt he have a perfect bracket
— Ethan Nash (@Ethan_Nash7) March 30, 2025
Damn it, we should have made money off this.
— TB (@braun6_trey) March 31, 2025
