While having four #1 seeds advance to the Final Four certainly sounds dull, it makes for spectacular Saturday matchups (on paper, at least).

All four teams are outstanding, with excellent offenses (all shoot 47% or better from the field) and suffocating defenses (all permit 42.3% or less, with Memphis and Kansas both allowing less than 39% shooting).

These aren’t “system” teams that have gotten there thanks to a good coach and a hot streak, they’re enormously talented. A pair of NBA mock drafts both have 10 players in this Final Four going in the first 32 picks of the draft. That’s quite a collection of talent on hand.

Let’s point out a fact or two about each team that maybe have somehow been overlooked in the storm of media coverage. Maybe these facts will help you from a pointspread perspective. Maybe they won’t.

Memphis: The free throw woes of the Tigers are well-documented. But Chris Douglas-Roberts is doing all he can to change things. After shooting only 67.4% from the line during the season, CDR has been a lights-out 36-43 (83.7%) from the line during the tournament. Memphis is only 7-13 their last 20 games against the pointspread, but most of those non-covers were laying big wood. Laying reasonable numbers in their two most recent games they’ve covered by a combined 27.5 points.

UCLA: The Bruins have an inferior defense to Memphis if you judge by field goal percentage allowed (38.8% to 41.7%), but the Pac Ten was not only the best, but also the most offensively advanced conference in the country. The level of competition faced by these two teams from early January through their conference tournaments isn’t even close. UCLA is a defense that is better than their stats.

Kansas: You think of Kansas as a fast-paced team, and they aren’t shy about getting up and down the court, but they average 8 fewer field goal attempts than North Carolina, which speaks to the breakneck pace favored by the Tar Heels. With Kansas averaging three fewer offensive rebounds, three fewer free throws, and turnovers just about equal, the Tar Heels make seemingly uptempo Jayhawks look like a Big Ten or CAA team in comparison.

North Carolina: Tyler Hansbrough is not getting to the line with the same regularity that he did throughout most of the season. Hansbrough shot an average of 10.7 free throws per game in the first 30 games of the season, but has enjoyed only 6.25 attempts per game from the charity stripe since then. UNC’s 23-10 pointspread record this season is remarkable considering they’re a public team that everyone wants to back. The Tar Heels allow 42.3% shooting, the worst mark among these four teams.

Enjoy the games Saturday night.