I have been requested by my boss to come up with a list of who I think will be the top four seeds in each bracket for publication in Sunday's edition of the Register. I usually take a stab at predicting the bracket each year and decided to come up with my own system to see if I could make sense of it.

It's a little confusing to follow but this is what I came up with a formula.

I did away with RPI and strength of schedule since I am going to utilize the basic information in both categories in other ways. I took the top 25 teams according to the www.realtimerpi.com site and ranked them from 1-25 on winning percentage, games against top 10 RPI teams, top 25 RPI teams, top 50 RPI teams and record in the last 10 games using 25 points for first all the way to 1 point for 25th. Believing the name of the game is wins and losses, I gave double point values to the winning percentage rankings.

Next, I assigned five points for winning the regular-season conference title and five for winning the tournament title (giving top seeds Oklahoma and Stanford the benefit of the doubt as conference tournament champions since it is unfair to penalize them because the conference tourneys haven't been completed yet).

Finally, I rewarded teams for quality of wins and penalized them for bad losses giving teams 10 points for every win over a team in the top 10 of the RPI, five points for each win over a team from 26-50 and one point for teams from 51-75. I subtracted a point for every loss of a team ranked from 26-50, two points for losses of teams from 51-75, three points for defeats to teams with RPIs from 76-99, five points for a loss to a team from 100-150 and 10 points for a loss to a team with an RPI of 151 or higher.

With all that said, here are the results
1. UConn 200.5
2. Oklahoma 195
3. Maryland 190.5
4. Duke 172
5. North Carolina 141
6. Baylor 128 (before the result of their win on Friday was known)
7. Florida State 126.5
8. Auburn 126
9. Louisville 123.5
10. Tennessee 106.5
11. Ohio State 104
12. Stanford 102
13. Texas A&M 97
14. Vanderbilt 94 1/2
15. Pittsburgh 84
16. Virginia 80 1/2

Bear in mind that this system does not analyze the wins or losses. A 25-point road win means the same as a one-point home victory and I imagine that tournament committee will be more diligent in looking closer at the wins and losses. This system is far from perfect since I don't see Tennessee being a three seed with 10 loss but when you look at their resume and look past the 10 losses, it could happen. Before I started this, I looked at them more as a fith or sixth seed. I also think Baylor (unless it wins the Big 12 tournament) will likely not be a two seed without an injured Danielle Wilson so if that proves to be the case, the top eight seeds were what I expected them to be before I started my research. Just throwing it out there that the team with the lowest point total among the 25 in this case study was Temple, now coached by former UConn assistant Tonya Cardoza.