Your Bracket's Already Busted, So Now What?
By the end of the first round, your bracket for March Madness is probably already busted. Typically, half of the brackets are done for after the first round. The vast majority of them will no longer be perfect after just two days of contests. What now?
Your bracket is toast, so what should you do?
If your bracket went under, there are two main options for what to do next. Depending on the type of sports fan you are, one might be more suited to you.
Option 1
The first option is to take it round by round. Plenty of bracket sites, ESPN most notably, offer you second chances to make picks for the Round of 32, Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, Final Four, and Championship. This way, it only matters that you pick the right games each round, making it a little easier to have success.
Instead of stressing over the fact that your Sweet Sixteen team lost in the first round, you can just reassess after the first couple of days of the tournament and essentially start a fresh bracket. Then, if you keep getting things wrong (which will happen, because none of us know a thing about March Madness), you can just keep making picks.
This is the ideal option for those of us who love getting down into the nitty-gritty. If you spent real time trying to make educated, informed picks, then this is for you. You get to keep making those educared choices based on the information at hand. Only this time, you'll have even more information.
If the team you picked to win because they had a dominant regular season barely survives an opening-round upset bid, then you might want to reexamine them. Maybe the lights are too bright, so in your next attempt at the bracket, you can pick based on that knowledge. More data is always good, and doing it round by round like this gives you the most possible data.
Option 2
The other option is more chaotic, but it might be more fun. If you lose a Final Four team in the Round of 32, then you should just root for chaos. "My bracket is already busted, so I hope xyz team just keeps it going," you can say. If you picked Purdue to make it to the Final Four but Queens upsets them, then you should become an honorary Queens fan and hope they can go a long way.
This doesn't have to be restricted to the teams you missed. If a Final Four team is out early, it's going to be really difficult for your bracket to rebound, no matter what. The odds are, your percentages will be awful when it's all said and done, so who cares? Let's throw the whole thing out.
You might've picked Duke, Houston, Virginia, and BYU to make the Final Four. If one of them falls out, there's no point crying over it. Just start rooting for all of them to be eliminated. For one thing, it would make your bracket hilarious, which is better than just being busted.
For another thing, it would be exceptionally chaotic for the actual tournament. Duke's the top seed. Anything less than a Final Four berth would be shocking. Let's root for shocking. The tournament is always filled with upsets, but the NIL and transfer portal have tipped the scales back to bigger schools.
Those talented players who play for mid-majors that wreck your bracket are now transferring after a year. It's hard for Akron to keep up since they lose players to bigger schools, for example. So if your bracket's busted, chaos is welcome because it would harken back to the old days when double-digit seeds made unfathomable runs a little more often.
