The college basketball season is more than halfway complete and a little over a month from now, conference tournaments will be beginning. Bracketologists are constructing NCAA Tournament brackets that are similar to the ones we will see in March and murmurs are beginning to grow about which teams are built to win in March Madness.

With most of the talk focusing on the top teams, here are three underrated teams looking to make a splash in the tourney.

Michigan State

Michigan State started this season with high expectations. The Spartans returned four of five starters from last year's Sweet 16 team and opened the year at #4 in the country. Their opening game was a gut punch — an overtime loss at home to James Madison. Few knew it at the time, but the Dukes turned out to be a pretty darn good basketball team.

Meanwhile, MSU continued to struggle in the early part of the year, dropping games to Duke and Arizona before falling out of the top 25 altogether after back-to-back defeats to Wisconsin and Nebraska. The Spartans now have seven losses on the season, yet three are against teams in the AP Top 25 while three more were Quad I road games, the JMU defeat is only a Quad II loss as well.

The Spartans have also started to play pretty good basketball. Tom Izzo's team has beaten Baylor and Indiana State in a recent 8-2 stretch while and is the sixth-best team in college basketball since December 16 per college basketball analytics website Bart Torvik. Michigan State will be a dangerous seven-seed or eight-seed in the NCAA Tournament that no top team will want to play.

Alabama

Like Michigan State, Alabama is another analytical darling that has bounced back well after a shaky start. Outside a stretch where the Rolling Tide lost five of seven games (with four coming against projected NCAA Tournament teams), Bama has just one loss on the year. Nate Oates' team recently took down #8 Auburn at home to give them four Quad I wins on the season and a 5-1 record in SEC play.

Alabama is 8th in both KenPom and the NET Rankings while boasting the second-best offense in the country. This squad has also improved defensively, posting a borderline top-25 defensive efficiency over the last month. With the big wins continuing to rack up, Bama will soon find itself as a favorable seed in the NCAA Tournament.

Indiana State

Indiana State is a 17-3 squad that has the the best effective field goal percentage in the country, a top 20 defense, and has only lost Quad I games. The squad is 25th in the NET Rankings. Yet the Sycamores are not an at-large team in most bracket projections.

Indiana State plays a beautiful and effective brand of basketball, ranking 24th in college basketballin assist rate and second in three-point percentage. Five players average multiple assists per game while Indiana State boasts six shooters who are 40% or better from beyond the arc.

The biggest issue for this team is a lack of quality wins. ISU has just one Quad I win and a single Quad II victory, with three more Quad II games in the regular season. Indiana State has played well in limited opportunities against good competition and will be a handful for a five-seed or six-seed come March.