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Reconfigurable arrays mold the propagation environment to benefit wireless systems. We use single-port polarization-reconfigurable antennas in a wideband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system and demonstrate the efficacy of reconfiguration techniques based on analytical channel models. We apply a double-directional channel model to show that polarization reconfiguration acts as an additional precoding step on an unpolarized channel. We use Jensen’s inequality to upper bound the spectral efficiency and leverage the relaxed objective to derive closed-form expressions for the optimal polarization angles at each antenna. We also derive upper bounds on the performance of a polarization reconfigurable system and develop an efficient procedure for polarization reconfiguration that aims to maximize these upper bounds. Numerical results show that the proposed simplified methods achieve near-optimal in wideband MIMO settings.