A four factor prediction

Winning a basketball game, college or pro, usually comes down to winning the four factors: effective field goal percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebounding percentage and free-throw rate.

Those four areas are the backbone to determining a team's efficiency and the underlying quality of a team's offense and defense. In other words, it's helpful when you're wondering just how good a team really is. As an added bonus, the four factors help a person see how well a team plays without the ball.

The factors aren't weighted equally, though. According to Dean Oliver, shooting is by far the most important factor, followed by turnovers, rebounding and free throws.

(Many, many more details about the four factors can be found here.)

Got all that? Good.

Because you'll want to read this post from The Audacity of Hoops, which does a predictive four factors for the Final Four. In other words, it's a tempo-free prediction of Saturday's games.

The prediction? Butler beats Michigan State because the Spartans commit too many turnovers, while Duke beats West Virginia because the Mountaineers can't shoot.

Mike Miller's also on Twitter, usually talkin' hoops. Click here for more.