The 4 Most Underrated Teams in the NCAA Tournament

The field is set, and as always, there is plenty of debate to be had. Arguing about the bracket -- which deserving teams got left out or which region is the toughest -- is as much of a March tradition as buzzer beaters, The Masters commercials and 12/5 upsets.

Something we run into each year is a handful of teams getting a worse seed than they deserve.

The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee seeds teams based on their resumes -- the full body of work a team compiles in terms who it played and who it beat. RPI-driven "team sheets," used by the Selection Committee, place a premium on strength of schedule and quality wins as driving factors when ranking teams for placement in the bracket.

Analytics-based ranking systems, such as our nERD power rankings, KenPom, Sagarin, and BPI, consider many other factors to determine the quality of a team's play. Inevitably these two approaches will diverge in some key areas. Here are the top four teams our rankings peg as the biggest sleepers lurking among the lower-seeded teams in the NCAA Tournament.

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