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COOPER women's NCAA basketball ratings

2026-03-12 · 20:57 UTC ·Silver Bulletin ·5 min read

Brief

COOPER is Silver Bulletin’s new Elo‑based power rating for women’s Division I basketball, released March 12, 2026 with ratings through March 11. Named for Cooper Flagg and Cynthia Cooper, the model builds on last year’s SBCB framework but adds a season carryover prior and an “impact factor” that upweights recent games, close contests, conference play, and NCAA tournament results. Inputs include wins, margin of victory, team tempo, preseason polls, and conference strength, and the system updates ratings Bayes‑style by comparing actual outcomes to model forecasts. The public post shows the top 16 (UConn leads with an Elo of 2686) but full outputs for all 363 teams — offensive/defensive splits, strength of schedule, home‑court adjustments, an objective‑only variant, historical ratings back to 2002–03, and a conversion spreadsheet to win probabilities and spreads — are available to paying subscribers. Tournament forecasts are promised after bracket release.

Cleaned source text

Silver Bulletin's brand new power ratings for all 363 women's Division I NCAA basketball teams.

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COOPER women's NCAA basketball ratings

Nate Silver, Joseph George, and Eli McKown-Dawson

Mar 12| | | ∙| | Preview

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🏀 Our latest COOPER ratings

March 12, 2026

We’re really doing double duty. See here and here for our most recent coverage of Iran. I’m also working on another story about the market’s reaction and the so-called TACO trade. But our NCAA tournament coverage is probably what Silver Bulletin is best known for outside of politics, and we’re not about to neglect it.

We launched the men’s version of our new COOPER ratings earlier this week. Today, it’s the women’s turn. As you’ll see, there are some much bigger discrepancies: for instance, the top women’s team — UConn, as usual — has an Elo rating of 2686 versus 2265 for the Duke men. For more about how all of this works, see the methodology page.

Our NCAA tournament forecasts will follow once the brackets are announced on Sunday. (Those should get out Sunday night for the men, but I’m guessing we’ll need until Monday for the women.) By default, new models like COOPER and our NCAA forecasts — whether sports or politics — are sent via email to all subscribers. However, if you don’t want to receive non-model emails about sports, here’s how to manage that in your inbox settings. For that matter, we also have some readers this time of year who _only_ care about sports. If you’re one of them, you can opt out of politics-related newsletters at the same link — though you will get an email about our midterm election forecast once that launches just in case you’re interested. _— NS 3/12/26

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See also: Men’s COOPER ratings.

This is the homepage for the women’s version of COOPER , Silver Bulletin’s new NCAA basketball rating system. This page is best viewed on the web rather than in your Substack app.

Named in honor of Cooper Flagg and Cynthia Cooper, COOPER accounts for wins and losses, margin of victory, team tempo¹, preseason polls and conference strength. Ratings partly carry over from season to season, but COOPER uses an “impact factor” that weights results from recent games, close matchups, conference games, and NCAA tournament games more heavily.

COOPER represents an evolution of the SBCB ratings that we used in 2025, which in turn are a derivation of Elo ratings. Like SBCB and Elo, COOPER ratings are Bayesian in the sense that ratings are adjusted on an ongoing basis as new games are played. Basically, we compare actual game results against COOPER’s forecast for each game. If a team beats COOPER’s expectations, its ratings improve. For more on how COOPER works, see our methodology page. Although the men’s and women’s ratings are highly similar, there is some customization for the women’s game, such as to reflect greater team continuity from season to season.

Here are our current top 16 teams:

The COOPER women's top 16

NCAA women through games of March 11, 2026

The rest of this page contains:

Offensive and defensive ratings for each team, along with strength of schedule ratings and custom home court factors;

An alternative version of COOPER that only uses objective data and isn’t influenced by human polls;

Extensive historical data in the form of season-ending COOPER ratings for every women’s basketball team since 2002-03, and;

A spreadsheet showing how to translate COOPER ratings to win probabilities and projected margins of victory (i.e. point spreads).

These features are a benefit for paying subscribers. And of course, subscribers will also get access to our men ’s and women’s NCAA tournament forecasts once those launch.

COOPER ratings for 2025-26

Here are COOPER’s current Elo ratings for all 363 women’s D1 teams, showing their highs and lows on the year, the “prior” we had for each team at the start of the 2025-26 season based largely on its ranking in human polls, and how its COOPER rating was affected by its most recent game...

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