These data-filled websites will help you dominate your March Madness pool

A guide to sites that the pros use—Bart Torvik, KenPom, Hoop Explorer, and more.

[Photo: Getty Images]

College basketball is like a comet. It burns at the center of the national sports world for exactly three weeks, and then largely disappears until the next year. During this brief window American sports fans become obsessed with figuring out who is going to win March Madness games, often involving teams they’ve never watched play and know nothing about.

The old adage is that the more college basketball you watch, the worse your NCAA Tournament bracket will be. But in the information age, you can gain an edge. If you know where to look and how to parse the information, you can find all the data you need to make educated calls on your tournament bracket.

Here are seven websites that could help you dominate your bracket pool:

Bart Torvik’s T-Rank is such a staple within the college basketball community that the predictive team ranking metric is on the list of criteria that the NCAA Selection Committee uses to determine the field.

But Bart Torvik goes much deeper than just one number. It’s a hub for team and player statistics, with a deep repository of free data. You can look at advanced box scores from every Division I game; split up rankings by date range, opponent quality, venue, and more; and look at a vast array of different player stats. While the database isn’t as vast, there’s also a deep array of women’s basketball statistics on the website, including full T-Rank pages for each team.

Among my favorite features is the one that lets you look at which teams have the most similar profiles, historically, to this year’s teams. For instance, based on the base weights of four factors (shooting, turnovers, rebounding, and free throws), results, adjusted efficiency metrics, and play style metrics, the most similar team to Arizona this year (at least since 2008) is the 2007-08 Memphis team that lost to Kansas in the National Championship game.

Bart Torvik is what you make of it: a rich database of free information. 

Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin on Turning AI Into a Competitive Advantage

© Fast Company