The Ultimate NCAA Tournament Downloadable Cheat Sheet

The folks here at numberFire are nerds. We're so nerdy, in fact, that one of the metrics we've created is literally called nERD, or the numberFire Efficiency Rating Derivative.

It sounds fancy, and the math that goes into it is fancy, but the end result is super easy to understand. For college hoops, nERD tells us the number of points we'd expect a team to win by against an average one on a neutral court. So a completely average team would have a nERD of 0.00, while we'd expect a team with a 10.07 nERD to beat an average one by about 10 points.

Naturally, nERD doesn't always match up with a team's seed -- the best team by nERD isn't always a 1 seed, for example.

Want to get a huge leg up on your March Madness pool? Subscribe to numberFire and get instant access to power rankings, bracket picks, game simulators, and tons of awesome expert advice to help you make the right decision.

Even better, we're offering subscriptions at our All-Pro level for $19.99 to first-time users over the first month when you use the promo code BRACKET.

Find Out More

How can you utilize this information, then? Well, when you're filling out your bracket, you should be trying to find which teams are overrated and underrated in order to pinpoint the squads to move forward in your bracket.

And that's where the cheat sheet comes in. The image below -- which you can download or click on to see a larger version -- includes a list of all 68 teams in this year's big dance, their nERD entering the tournament, the historical nERD we've typically seen at their respective seed, and the difference between those two numbers. It's essentially an objective ranking that shows which teams are most over-seeded and under-seeded.