Use March Madness History to Pick the Perfect 2021 Bracket

How history, coaching, conferences, seed expectations, and geography can help you pick the perfect NCAA tournament bracket…

SportsRaid
Published in
36 min readMar 17, 2021

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SO MARCH MADNESS IS FINALLY HERE AGAIN AFTER TWO YEARS TOO LONG, and you need to pick the perfect bracket. This time of year, you’re always looking for just about any advantage you can find. Everybody uses advanced metrics and Four Factors these days, and that magic word “KenPom” is no longer a secret that gives you a leg up on everyone on your bracket pool.

So where can we find an edge? Maybe by looking through the lens of the past.

We’ve been here before in 2019, 2018, and 2017 with some real success, so let’s do it again. We’ll break down each team and region by looking at the past. History doesn’t always repeat itself — after all, we call it March Madness for a reason — but it does give us many strong predictive tools.

Here are some of the historical factors worth considering:

The Methodology to the Madness

  • School history — Does the team have a long history of success? Is this their best team ever? For teams with plenty of history, what’s their history in more recent games or within this…

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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 ✞