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Let March Madness History Build the Perfect 2021 Second Chance Bracket

All those upsets sure screwed up a lot of brackets, but there’s still time to right the ship and figure out this wacky March Madness

Brandon Anderson
Published in
16 min readMar 25, 2021

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SO YOUR MARCH MADNESS BRACKET IS ALREADY COMPLETELY BUSTED. Blame Illinois, or maybe Ohio State or Iowa or Purdue. Heck, blame the Big 10 conference apparently, what a disaster! Maybe your bracket is busted, or perhaps you’re narrowing down your Survivor pool options or joining a Second Chance bracket pool. Whatever the reason, you’ve come to the right place.

Last week, history gave us all sorts of good bracket tips. History warned Illinois about Loyola Chicago and marked Ohio State as very vulnerable, and it told us UCLA, Syracuse, and Oregon were sleepers who could make deep runs. It turns out that we can learn quite a bit from school and conference history, coaching performance, seed expectations, and even preseason outlook, almost as much as from the teams themselves.

So let’s reset this thing with 16 teams left and see if we can build the perfect Second Chance bracket. What can we learn about the Sweet Sixteen and the rest of March Madness going forward?

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Brandon Anderson
SportsRaid

Sports, NBA, NFL, TV, culture. Words at Action Network. Also SI's Cauldron, Sports Raid, BetMGM, Grandstand Central, Sports Pickle, others @wheatonbrando ✞