( CNN ) -- Here 's a hot tip : The University of North Carolina is going to win the NCAA men 's basketball tournament . A Georgia Tech professor 's computer model suggests UNC will win this year 's NCAA men 's basketball tournament . At least that 's the prediction of Joel Sokol , a Georgia Tech professor whose statistical model correctly selected the Final Four , championship game and winner of last year 's tournament . Be glad he 's not in your office 's betting pool . Finding some kind of rationality in March Madness , which starts in earnest Thursday , has been an American pastime for decades . Tournament brackets are everywhere , and from sports TV to the dinner table , everyone seems to have predictions about which team will claim the top spot , and why . But in recent years , `` bracketology , '' as sorting out the single-elimination basketball tournament is sometimes called , has increasingly become the scientific endeavor its name suggests . It 's even something on which university professors and professional statisticians stake their reputations . Watch Sokol explain his predictions » . There are at least 40 individual people or groups using statistical models to analyze college basketball and rank its teams online , according to Kenneth Massey , whose Web site , masseyratings.com , lets users compare the analyses . Anecdotal evidence suggests more people are getting in the game , perhaps because the raw data used to run the equations -- team records , point margins and the like -- is easily accessible on the Internet . All of these off-shoot predictions supplement the official computer model used by the NCAA , which is called the Rating Percentage Index . But a selection committee of live people still ranks teams and puts them in tournament brackets . At their cores , the computer models all operate like question machines , said Jeff Sagarin , who has been doing computer ratings for USA Today since 1985 . Different people come up with different brackets because they 're asking different questions . Sagarin 's equations ask three questions : `` Who did you play , where did you play and what was the result of each specific game ? '' The computer keeps repeating those questions in an `` infinite loop '' until it comes up with a solid answer , he said . Sagarin has arranged the formula as such partly because he thinks home-court advantage is a big deal in college basketball . Other models ask different questions or give the questions different weights . Sokol , of Georgia Tech , for example , cares more about the win-margin than where the game was played . He got into NCAA basketball prognosticating after watching his team , Georgia Tech , lose a nail-biter in 2002 when Tennessee hit a shot at the buzzer from half court . Sports analysts made a big deal of the loss , he said , which seemed statistically dumb to Sokol . As far as he 's concerned a close game might as well be a tie -- the toss of a coin could predict the winner . `` That last shot is almost meaningless , '' he said . It took a few years of testing for Sokol to start believing in his computer model , which was the subject of an academic paper in 2004 . That year , Georgia Tech made it to the Final Four , which Sokol and colleagues had predicted . `` They really kind of made us believers in our own system , '' he said . Sagarin , who has one of the older and more respected prediction equations in the business , said a year or two of success does not mean a model will continue to foretell the outcome of the tournament correctly . He grew up a sports junkie who was `` too skinny '' to make it big on the court or field . For a time , he used his intimate knowledge of statistics and college basketball to bet on the annual NCAA tournament . Buzzer-beating shots became the bane of his existence , and in 1983 , after Houston lost to underdog North Carolina State on a last-second dunk in the tournament final , Sagarin gave up on betting . `` Each year I try to put minor improvements in [ the computer model ] and test in the off-season , but that all goes out the window when guys hit three-point shots at the buzzer , '' he said . `` There 's a lot of luck in life . Life is a series of heads and tails , and human beings try to describe rationale behind them ... when in fact it may be random . '' Dan Shanoff , who blogs on sports at danshanoff.com , said gut feeling is more important than statistics , but taking a look at the numbers can never hurt . In the end , he said , it 's all chance . `` You think you know everything about college basketball and then all of a sudden your mom is finishing ahead of you [ in a tournament pool ] , which happens every year to me with my mom , '' he said . Shanoff 's gut tells him Louisville will win the men 's tournament this year . Sokol , of Georgia Tech , puts Louisville in the Final Four with UNC , Pittsburgh and the University of Memphis . He said Michigan State and Oklahoma are ranked too high and due for an upset , statistically speaking . While all of this information could be helpful for people betting on the Big Dance , Sheldon H. Jacobson , a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois , said he does n't fill out a bracket , despite the fact that he 's developed a computer model for the tournament . `` I enjoy the games and I enjoy the tournament , and not filling out a bracket gives me the freedom to do that , '' he said .
People are using computer models to try to pick NCAA basketball winners . A successful model from Georgia Tech picks UNC to win this year . As more data is available online , the practice appears to be more popular . One professor says it 's more fun to watch for fun than fill out bracket .