March Madness is upon us, beginning with the First Four tonight. To help college basketball fans and casuals get ready for the Big Dance, we at Sports-Reference have prepared a small guide of features available on our site for just such an occasion.

Of course, what is a college basketball site without some brackets to pore over? In addition to having all four regions available in bracket form, we have links to all of the participating schools. Maybe you're looking for Providence's strength of schedule? Or maybe you need to catch up on who else is playing with DeAndre Ayton at Arizona? That and a lot more can be found on every team's 2017-18 page, easily found on the bracket.

Other features include:

Our NCAA Tournament Forecast, which bases odds of teams reaching the Sweet 16 and beyond on 5,000 simulations. This forecast will keep updating as real-life tournament results come in.

We have records and box scores of every NCAA Tournament going back to 1939. So if you need a refresher on how North Carolina got to the championship game last year, or are feeling nostalgic for the days when Georgetown was actually in the tournament, we have it all.

The NCAA Tournament Matchup Finder is ready for your bracketology research purposes. Maybe you need some context on how often the 13 seed pulls off an upset in the first round? Perhaps you'd like to take a 7 seed making it to the Final Four in three out of the last four tournaments into account when filling out the bracket? All of that info is at your fingertips with the Matchup Finder.

Our NCAA Tournament Player Game Finder will come in handy when you want to compare this year's standout players to stars of years past. Maybe we'll need to know who else went off for 40 points in a first round game. Let's hope for fireworks.

We'll also be keeping track of All-Region Teams, All-Tournament Teams and the Most Outstanding Player; you can find those bestowed with these honors in previous tournaments on our site as well.

From LIU v. Radford tonight to the National Championship Game at the Alamodome on April 2, we'll be here keeping you updated on all the latest in tournament action!

Our friends at Sports Info Solutions (formerly known as Baseball Info Solutions) have provided us with a pitch framing measure back to 2011, which we have added to Baseball Reference. Before I explain any further, if you're unfamiliar with the concept of pitch framing please read Mike Fast's 2011 article on the topic and Ben Lindbergh's 2013 follow up.

The stat that we have added is called Strike Zone Runs Saved. It represents the runs saved by catcher framing. In our tables, it's labeled RszC and it's available from 2011 to the present. While this statistic is a potential component of Defensive Runs Saved (and therefore WAR), please note that we have elected to not integrate this number into DRS (or WAR) at this time. We may elect to do so in the future, but for now we agree with Bill James's stance that waiting for further research is a good idea.

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I'm pleased to welcome Alex Bonilla to Sports Reference as a User Affairs Coordinator. He'll be answering user questions, working on our new Stathead.com newsletter and much more. He's on twitter at @AlexChacon_OVA. This hire brings us to ten full-time employees.

In other news, Mike Lynch has been promoted from Users Affairs Coordinator and is now Product Manager for Sports Reference.

You may have noticed that our homepage has upcoming Spring Training games listed in the MLB Probable Pitchers section. If you click on a team's name in that section, it will bring up their 2018 Spring Training stats. For instance, here's the 2018 Yankees Spring Training stats. We'll be updating the stats daily.

We also have this register of all 2018 Spring Training stats. If you're looking to access that page via the site, it can be found in the 2018 season menu under the batting or pitching dropdown.

With March Madness right around the corner, we're very excited to announce the latest addition to the Play Index: The NCAA Tournament Player Game Finder! This tool allows users to make custom searches through every individual box score line in NCAA Tournament history, all the way back to the inaugural tournament in 1939. This tool is powered by the most robust, complete collection of NCAA Tournament box scores available online and allows for all sorts of searches for single-game leaders, single-tournament leaders and career tournament leaders.

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Thanks to the efforts of our friends at Retrosheet, we have added box scores back to the 1908 season to Baseball Reference (previously, our coverage went back to 1913). Additionally, we have added play-by-play coverage for games games as far back as 1925. Previously, our oldest play-by-plays were from 1930. In addition to the boxes and PBPs themselves, this update allows for a variety of new information searchable in the play index, as well as new rows of information in team/player/league statistics tables.

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Two years ago, LeBron James passed Michael Jordan to become the NBA's all-time leader in Value Over Replacement Player (which is calculated back to 1973-74). Now, LeBron has passed Jordan on the NBA's All-Time Win Shares list. Both players still trail Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain and Karl Malone, however.

For more nuanced perspective on how these five players stack up, please visit this detailed comparison from our Player Comparison Finder tool.

To enhance our coverage of NFL Players of the Week, we have also added an NFL Player of the Week leaderboard. As you can see, Tom Brady is the all-time leader in this honor, which dates back to 1984.

We've made a small addition to the Basketball Reference Team Streak Finder. You can now restrict your searches to active streaks. So you can now search for things like longest active win streak or longest active streaks with a 3-pointer made.

I'm pleased to welcome Jaclyn Mahoney and Jay Hutchinson to Sports Reference in the roles of Data Developer. They'll be working behind the scenes to make sure our data is accurate and updated in a timely manner. Their main focus, for now, will be helping us push FBref.com out the door this spring.

I've written a bit about them on our About Page.