We’ve got your 2011 NCAA Tournament Champion ... we think

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Who will cut down the nets at the NCAA Final Four in Houston? It says here, that Coach K and Duke will repeat as NCAA Champions. | AP

Now that the 68-team NCAA Tournament field has been whittled to 16, it’s time to pick a winner. Forget the my-favorite-school-color method or the my-mascot-can-kill-your-mascot theory—no, this is Serious Basketball Analytics 101.

In the old days (after UCLA was done winning 55 straight), all you had to do was identify the team with more McDonald’s All-Americans and you had your winner. Dean Smith has nine. Denny Crum has six. Simple: Dean beats Denny. (Digression: Heck, there were some years Smith’s Tar Heels were so deep with McDonald’s talent, I thought I saw Ronald McDonald himself at the end of their bench. N.C. State, on the other hand, always seemed to get stuck with the Hamburglar?)

But the McDonald’s theory--every National Champion since 1979 has had a McDonald’s All-American on the roster except for Maryland in 2002-- is no longer foolproof. Yes, Duke had seven last year, but how do you explain Butler--with none--coming within a whisker of winning. Speaking of that 2002 Maryland team, they did have four NBA players--Juan Dixon, Steve Blake, Lonny Baxter (drafted by Bulls) and Chris Wilcox.

Which brings us to my NBA method of picking the winner which states: Find the team with the most good NBA prospects and you found your champion.

Like the McDonald’s theory, this method places considerable emphasis on talent and has worked very well … until recently.

But, why? Why have two systems that seemed so infallible, suddenly failed.

Well, I think the NCAA’s one-and-done rule (Derrick Rose, John Wall, etc.) has rendered both methods of prognosticating flawed. Not broken, but flawed.

You can’t just rely on a one-year wonder, like Wall or Rose, to take your team to the top. I think now more than ever, experience and coaching come into play. Yes, last year’s Duke team was loaded with McDonald’s talent, but five of them had more than one year’s experience, and local star Jon Scheyer had four.

So, like all theories, it needs tweaking.

Our new formula for this season: NBA talent + McDonald’s All-Americans + experience + coaching = NCAA Champ

I know it looks a little cumbersome, but, hey, so did Einstein’s theory of relativity when he first wrote that on the chalkboard. (Digression: It’s still better than the eye test from Dick Vitale’s wife that would have put Colorado in the field ahead of VCU.)

With our working formula in place, let’s break down the Sweet 16. (Spoiler alert: This column will not give you a definitive clear-cut winner that will help retrieve your lost 401K earnings, but it will steer you away from several teams that will steal your money quicker than a Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.)

Based on the McDonald’s method, here are your top teams: North Carolina (6); Duke (5); Kentucky (3); Ohio State (3) and Connecticut (2). Interestingly, the last two McDonald’s MVPs are still in the tournament: Harrison Barnes (North Carolina) 2009 and Jared Sullinger (Ohio State) 2010.

As for the NBA method, Duke, Kentucky, Ohio State and North Carolina all figure to have three players drafted next season, with Kentucky probably having two in the Top 10.

So, where does that leave us? Confused.

This proves why this might be the most wide-open field in years.

The problem is, three of the loaded teams—Ohio State, Kentucky, North Carolina--are in the East Regional. Duke, in the West, needs only to get past UConn and Kemba Walker. Meanwhile, the Southwest and Southeast are devoid of any real loaded teams—only Kansas and Florida come close to fitting the McDonald’s-NBA mold.

But let’s plug in the rest of our formula, beginning with experience. North Carolina showed a real lack of experience in its win over Marquette. As always, we can expect experience problems from Kentucky as well. They gone.

So, that leaves us with a Final Four of Ohio State, Duke, Kansas and Florida.

Whoever wins the Duke-Ohio State game will win it all. Using the final piece to our formula—coaching—I give Coach K and his Blue Devils a slight edge over Thad Matta and his Buckeyes.

Duke wins. (But keep an eye out for Florida State.)