You only have a few minutes left to fill out your 2011 NCAA Tournament bracket -- the first game starts at 6:40 pm ET. You don't have time to listen to a bunch of March Madness picks and predictions by humans. You need some cold, hard numbers. Here are three different formulas you can use to fill out your bracket:
Pythag: Rocky Top Talk, SB Nation's Tennessee Volunteers community, advocates picking strictly by pythag, or team pythagorean expected wins. It's basically the number of wins a team should win, rather than the number of games a team did win.
Pythag predicts an Ohio State national title, with all three other No. 1 seeds making the Final Four. The closest things to surprises are No. 3 Purdue and No. 3 Syracuse making the Elite Eight and No. 10 FSU over No. 7 Texas A&M. Bold!
LRMC: From The Rumble Seat, SB Nation's Georgia Tech community, pimps LRMC, a probability system developed by a Tech professor. It thinks my beloved Belmont Bruins are the No. 4 team in the country despite trailing the Kennesaw St. Owls just last week, so I'm totally aboard with LRMC. Ohio State is No. 1 here too, though they're followed by Duke instead of Kansas.
Other LRMC winners include Texas, Washington, Utah State, and Kentucky; losers include Pitt, Notre Dame, and -- whoa, that's a plunge -- Florida.
FiveThirtyEight: The New York Times' Nate Silver has a secret-sauce formula that also takes Ohio State over Kansas, with Pitt and Duke in the Final Four. Definitely preferred the one that sent the Atlantic Sun team deep into tourney glory. The major upsets here: FSU over A&M again, No. 11 Gonzaga over St. John's, and No. 10 Michigan State over UCLA.
If you like math, looks like you're taking Ohio State to win the title, with FSU pulling an upset, Florida falling early, and Belmont threatening.
For more on the 2011 NCAA Tournament, visit SB Nation's NCAA Basketball hub.