2026 March Madness Predictions
Silver Bulletin odds for the men's NCAA tournament, powered by our new COOPER ratings.
🏀 The latest March Madness projections
Updated March 29, 2026
Well, that Duke-UConn game was one of the best finishes that you’re ever going to see in college hoops. Earlier, I’d been preparing to make the argument that margin of victory matters: Michigan’s dominance so far throughout the tournament, including beating Tennessee by 33 points today, was a more favorable indicator for the Final Four than Duke just sneaking by Connecticut by a few points. But instead of a narrow win, Duke lost, and Braylon Mullins will never again have to buy his own drink in the state of Connecticut.
Although Michigan is our model’s favorite and a truly excellent basketball team, the other three Final Four teams are also capable; I wouldn’t sleep on Illinois in particular, even if they don’t have a #1 seed attached to their name. -NS, 3/29/26
See also: Women’s March Madness Predictions, Men’s COOPER ratings.
Sure, it might seem like the world’s gone a little crazy. But at least we’ll be getting a dose of March Madness. The NCAA tournament is perhaps our very favorite event here at Silver Bulletin.1 In fact, the tournament really needs no introduction. I’ve been running versions of these projections since 2011, almost ten years before I’d even heard of Substack.
But pretty much every part of the model has changed at some point. Instead of compiling other people’s projections, we now mostly rely on our own in the form of our new COOPER ratings — although we blend them with Ken Pomeroy’s ratings (because we think Pomeroy is pretty much the best, present company excluded.) We’ve also upgraded our technology stack. Believe it or not, until last year, part of the work for our NCAA model was still being done in Microsoft Excel.2 Now we’ve built the code to run proper simulations — 100,000 at a time — which enables more sophisticated handling of injuries (and there are a lot of them this year), among other things. This isn’t an “AI-driven” model quite yet, though Claude and other AI tools are increasingly helping us smooth out some of the code's rough patches and turn these numbers around more quickly.
Still, March Madness is eternal. If nothing else, there will be upsets: we’ve calculated that the odds of having a perfect bracket are on the order of 1 in 10 quintillion. I guess I’ll just have to concede that we’re living in a simulation if it happens.
How our NCAA forecasts work
This is what we call a landing page, meaning that both the numbers and the text will change. We strongly recommend checking out the web version with this link, which provides for better rendering of charts than the Substack app or email.
We’ll update these numbers once per day after tournament games are played. In the interest of underpromising and hopefully overdelivering, sometimes the update will need to wait until the morning, but we’re hoping to get it out in the evening most of the time.
The ratings give 5/8ths of the weight to COOPER and 3/8ths to Pomeroy. There are lots of other systems out there, but basically, that’s the mix I’d use if I were betting on the games myself.
They also account for injuries, travel distance, and — once the tournament is underway — how teams have performed so far in the tourney relative to the model’s expectations. (Early-round over- or underperformance is often fairly predictive of what happens later on.) For more details about how all of this works behind the scenes, see our methodology page.
Women’s projections are now ready also and can be found here.
Let’s start with the overall leaders:
What you’ll find on the rest of this page — and throughout the tourney
The rest of this page contains:
Region-by-region projections of each team’s chances of advancing to each round, plus my first thoughts on each region. Analysis of the East region is free for everyone, while the rest is a bonus for paid subscribers.
Odds for forthcoming games (win probabilities, point spreads, totals, etc.)
A comparison of the ratings systems used in the projections and the impact of injuries.
And a spreadsheet version of these projections. We’re hoping to archive these so you’ll be able to see how our odds have evolved throughout the tournament.
Our tour begins in the East:
Next up, the South, who will face the East winner in the Final Four.