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COOPER NCAA basketball ratings

2026-03-10 · 23:14 UTC ·Silver Bulletin ·5 min read

Brief

COOPER, Silver Bulletin’s new NCAA men’s basketball rating system, launched March 10, 2026 from Nate Silver, Joseph George, and Eli McKown‑Dawson and provides ratings for all 365 Division I teams. Technically, COOPER is a Bayesian, Elo‑derived model that blends objective game data (wins/losses, margin, pace) with preseason polls and conference strength, carries priors across seasons, and uses an “impact factor” to weight recent games, close matchups, conference contests, and tournament games more heavily. The men’s ratings are live and updated roughly daily; the women’s ratings are still being finalized. Silver Bulletin will roll COOPER into its March Madness projections after Selection Sunday (brackets announced March 15, 2026), with the men’s forecast due that night. Detailed outputs — offense/defense splits, strength‑of‑schedule, home‑court factors, a poll‑free variant, historical ratings back to 1949–50, and a spreadsheet mapping ratings to win probabilities — are subscriber‑only, and the post notes COOPER currently ranks Duke very highly.

Cleaned source text

Silver Bulletin's brand new power ratings for all 365 men's Division I NCAA basketball teams.

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COOPER NCAA basketball ratings

Nate Silver, Joseph George, and Eli McKown-Dawson

Mar 10| | | ∙| | Preview

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🏀 Our latest COOPER ratings

March 10, 2026

Today is launch day for COOPER , Silver Bulletin’s new NCAA basketball ratings! The men’s ratings are ready today; we’re working on finalizing the women’s version. We’ll then publish our March Madness projections, incorporating COOPER with other data, after the brackets are announced on March 15 (Selection Sunday). The men’s tournament forecast will land that night (possibly late); we’ll probably need until the next day for the women.

We’re very excited about all of this. Two housekeeping items first:

This page is designed to be viewed on the web rather than in our email client or in the Substack app. COOPER will be updated roughly once per day, either in the evening or the morning after the full slate of games is played. The data in the tables and some of the text on this page will change.

Monthly_ pricing for _new_ subscribers will increase temporarily during the NCAA tournament. This will not affect people who are already paid subscribers , and it will not affect our annual pricing. The reason for this is that new monthly subscriptions during the tourney tend to churn at high rates. We think the annual subscription is a better deal, especially with the World Cup and the midterms also set to come this year. But if you aren’t subscribed yet, you can still permanently lock in our standard rate if you sign up before Sunday.

And now, let’s get to the numbers. You’re never going to believe it, but it turns out that COOPER really likes Duke -NS _, 3/10/26

Upgrade to paid

This is the homepage for COOPER , Silver Bulletin’s new NCAA basketball rating system. Named in honor of Cooper Flagg and Cynthia Cooper, it accounts for wins and losses, margin of victory, team pace, 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.

Here are our current top 16 teams:

The COOPER Top 16

NCAA men through games of March 9, 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 men’s basketball team since 1949-50, 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 365 men’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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