[Hey, today's the last day of College Football Risk. Go show the other schools why MGoBlog's community is so unfairly large they need to keep making rules to nerf us.]

Every year I go way overboard in bracket prep. The result is all the data on all the tournament teams all laid out before out thusly:

For those of you who still have Excel, you get to automatically create YOUR VERY OWN SETHCHART IN EXCEL. That's a download link to the above. Put in the name of the team you want to look at, and it’ll show you the lineups and injuries and player data including the shot charts.

There's also a DUMBED DOWN GOOGLE SHEET VERSION I'm still working on if you can't get Excel to work and a simplified text only TEAM COMPARISON tool.

Those links allow you to download your own copy. FAQ for these graphics.

[After THE JUMP: how to use it and one or two findings.]

How to Use It

The box in the upper left is where you put the name of the team. It's a dropdown—the fastest way to go through them is to use Alt-Down arrow then scroll. By default I have them in order of when you'd come upon them while filling out a bracket.

If you look at only two things it's the usage bubbles (which don't work on Goggle Sheets yet).

If most of the bubble is filled in, that player is using a huge number of his team's possessions. When comparing teams, my favorite way to find upsets is to look for usage and then see if there's a defensive stopper at that position, or some other way to neutralize that player. Or vice versa, if there's a dude at a spot that's given their opponent trouble before.

Many of those I've noted in the This win told us: and This loss told us: boxes. Keep in mind everything is relative, because it's easy to take knowledge too far. For example, West Virginia gets a ton of their scoring from pullups in the backcourt, the one thing that Bama and their hugeness 3-5 doesn't really defend against as much. Buuuut….

…keep your eye on the chalk and ask yourself how many points of relevance that is going to be. Also ask yourself if a 9-seed that can't take advantage of small centers is getting past an 8-seed with a small center and lots of length outside (Maryland) before you take them to upset the #1.

Most of the data are from Kenpom and Torvik, with the injuries from a combination of lists, my favorite being covers.com, but they miss lower seed things and recent things. Kenpom is good at highlighting a player who missed a game. Distance factor was calculated by putting the schools' addresses into Google Maps (I have a tool). The shot charts are data from Hoop-Math. The last piece then is playing around a ton on Synergy to understand what kinds of shots and plays each player makes. Knowing how much their shots are contested is a big deal, especially because teams lie with assists.

Last year's version of this has the latest list of sites I recommend.

Who do you like this year?

I've got KSU in the Final 4.

I believe in guard play in the Tournament, and Nowell is what we're all hoping Dug will grow into someday: a 40 assist rate bug who's too small for the NBA but makes everything operate smoothly and annoys the hell out of you on defense. Tennessee just lost their star PG, and Purdue's a pretty iffy 1-seed that hasn't been playing well. So it's between the 2 and 3 seeds, and I've been siding with Big 12 teams when it's close because their conference schedule was even more brutal than the Tourney. And they're adding Houston!