VIDEO: The Mentalist on Get Up Was Either Shamelessly Fake or the Most Impressive Thing I've Ever Seen

Today, Michelle Beadle, Mike Greenberg, and Jalen Rose launched Get Up!, ESPN’s morning show that was nearly two years in the making. At the end of the maiden program, they had mentalist Oz Pearlman on.

Everyone on the show kept swearing up and down that this was not fake and that Pearlman’s predictions were stored in a tamper-proof envelope and briefcase handcuffed to a producer for three weeks. Enclosed were his accurate predictions about the Final Four (he picked Loyola?!?!) and the current basketball player that Jalen would think of when prompted today.

While everyone involved did a great selling job, this just could not have been real, right? If he was this good, wouldn’t he be betting futures tickets in Vegas and living on a luxury yacht somewhere instead of shlepping on television? FWIW, 550 out of 17.3 million entries got the Final Four on ESPN.com.

If it was real, getting these two things right together was wildly impressive, but I’m going to lean towards thinking it’s far more probable than not that this was all contrived. What do you think?