Final Four Favorites: Kansas, Syracuse, Duke...and Baylor!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year basketball fans.

The madness of March has returned and the field of 65 is set. Whatifsports.com is excited to follow-up its NCAA basketball predictions of 2008 (Kansas) and 2009 (North Carolina) by accurately predicting the 2010 NCAA basketball champion. Their award-winning college basketball simulation engine has “played” the NCAA basketball tournament 2000 times.

Their predictions are based on each team’s statistical make-up and are adjusted for roster trends, including each player’s average minutes per game and injuries.

So after 2,000 simulations of the 2010 NCAA basketball tournament, the computers select the Kansas Jayhawks (26.4 percent chance of winning championship) as the favorite to win the national championship.

The computer simulations predict Syracuse has the second best chance of winning the title. The Orange have a 17.6 percent chance of winning it all in Indy (note: Their simulation ran with Arinze Onuaku in the lineup).

The shock and awe of the  Whatifsports.com Final Four prediction is the Baylor Bears. The 3-seed Bears have the third highest chance (8.7 percent) of cutting down the nets in Indianapolis.

Duke (6.2 percent), followed by West Virginia and Kentucky (4.9 percent), round out the tournament favorites heading into round one.

Another website I found (predictionmachine.com) runs similar simulations but with 50,000 simulations rather than the aforementioned 2,000. Here is a quote explaining how the system works and their results.

On How This Works

“We are actually playing the game a possession at a time, every single game 50,000 times. What we are really doing is playing the tournament 50,000 times. We advance all the teams and then we do it again and ultimately 50,000 times so we can good sense of the likelihood of any team making it to any level.

"The stats themselves that are being fed in—what is really important is per possession stats or pace-adjustments. Pay attention to what teams do every possession and how effective they are. If they get rebounds or cause turnovers to extend or shorten possessions that is important as well.

"On top of that, strength of schedule adjusting which is really difficult with 350 or so teams in college basketball. But that’s why we’re here.

"Long story short, we are really playing every single play all the way through of a game and then doing that 49,999 more times.”

On Villanova and the South Region

“Villanova makes the Sweet 16 47.5 percent of the time. That may not be more likely than 50 percent, but they have a higher percentage than anyone else so they would be in our most likely Sweet 16.

"After that Villanova tapers off pretty quickly because then they run into Baylor. And Baylor is one of our Final Four teams and is actually in our national championship game. Baylor is coming on strong and are very well constructed that is efficient offensively and defensively. Duke and Baylor are significantly more likely to make the Final Four.

"And even Texas A&M based on where they are is more likely to make the Final Four than Villanova.”

I know that a lot of people are the drinking the green kool-aid, especially because today is St. Patty’s Day, but these simulations are outside of human bias. I never take too much stock in math, simulations, or the fact that Joe Lunardi picked us in his Final Four, but in the history of Baylor basketball this has never even been in discussion.

Let’s just hope at 1:45 tomorrow, we back it all up.

This article originally appeared on Bear Crawl of the FanTake network.

Follow Bear Crawl on Twitter @BearCrawlBaylor