I was sitting down to take my first long look at the Final Four today when, as I often do, I started to think about whether there were overriding rules that should be followed when handicapping college basketball’s last three games of the year. I tend to do this kind of thing whenever I am faced with an annual event. It’s not because I am looking for a system or a shortcut – those don’t exist, or at least not without a ridiculous amount of research and study to uncover them. Instead, I do it because it helps me to focus better on the games at hand, and to prioritize the ridiculous amount of information that I will be faced with. If you don’t have some kind of a framework to build upon when you look at a wildly public game like these three will be then you are vulnerable to being led astray by the ‘experts’ and whatever topics they happen to be focused on these days. In the last two rounds, for example, it would have been pretty easy to discount Memphis because we heard endlessly how badly they shot fouls and how much that matters. As it turns out they shot very well from the line, and they would have won both games fairly handily even if they had been much, much worse.

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