2026 Women's March Madness Predictions
Silver Bulletin odds for every round of the tournament, powered by our new COOPER ratings.
We recommend checking out the web version of our women’s March Madness predictions using this link, which provides for better rendering of charts than the Substack app or email.
You can also view our men’s March Madness forecast here.
Personally, I think it’s pretty great that the women’s NCAA tournament has become a huge deal. Who’s going to object to double the March Madness? Or another opportunity to build a cool model for Silver Bulletin subscribers? But I need to remind you that there are significant differences between the men’s and women’s games, and those are especially pertinent this year.
Every year, when we publish the men’s forecast, we urge you to remember that there will be a lot of upsets. The #1 seeds in our men’s bracket this year — Arizona, Duke, Michigan and Florida — have a combined 57 percent chance to win the national title. We put a lot of work into calibrating these numbers properly and that’s in the same ballpark as the historical rate, though #1 seeds have been on a hot streak recently.
On the women’s side, conversely, we have the #1 seeds — UConn, South Carolina, Texas and UCLA — with a combined 95 percent chance of winning the hardware this year:
That directionally matches the historical data — since the tournament began in 1982, only three teams below a #2 seed have won the women’s tourney (all of them #3s). But the pattern wasn’t as extreme in our forecasts last year, largely because UConn (whom we had as the 2nd-best overall team) was inexplicably seeded as a #2. This year, there’s a much bigger cliff between exactly the first four seeds and everyone else, with the partial exception of #2 seed LSU, which would be plenty good enough to earn a 1-seed in most years.
Everything runs through the Huskies this year, though, because UConn is undefeated again. Take a look at their composite rating of 2684. These ratings are literally designed to be on the same scale as Elo ratings that were originally derived for chess. So that UConn rating is basically equivalent to Magnus Carlsen’s ~2800 Elo. And the early rounds of the tournament for teams like UConn usually resemble what you’d get if Carlsen were to face a random club player: something has to go very wrong for them to lose. While upsets can occur in the opening rounds — let’s not forget Harvard-Stanford in 1998 — they’re considerably less likely than for the men, especially considering that the top seeds host home games in the first two rounds.
While there are some differences between our men’s and women’s COOPER ratings — notably, that women’s programs have more carryover from year to year, in part because women can’t join the WNBA until age 221 — this dominance for the top teams mostly emerges organically from the data. The top women’s teams win a lot, often almost doubling their opponents’ scores in the opening rounds of the tournament.
You are likely to see some great games in this year’s tourney, however. Based on our historical COOPER ratings, the other #1 seeds this year — UCLA, Texas and South Carolina — are roughly as good as typical overall #1s from past tournaments. So the Huskies will be challenged, even if it’s not until the Final Four. There’s also a great potential Elite Matchup looming between UCLA and LSU.
Let’s run through the numbers. The rest of this page contains:
Region-by-region projections of each team’s chances of advancing to each round, plus my quick commentary.
Odds for forthcoming games (win probabilities, point spreads, totals, etc.) customized to the women’s game.
A comparison of the ratings systems used in the projections — we blend COOPER with ratings from HerHoopStats — and how we adjust them for injuries.
And a spreadsheet version of these projections.
Let’s start in UConn’s region, which is clumsily named2 “Fort Worth 1” after the site of the regional final and the Huskies’ #1 overall seed.
The best game here might be #4 UNC vs #5 Maryland in the Round of 32. Those teams are almost evenly matched in our composite ratings. But as I mentioned, the top 4 seeds host games in the opening rounds, so that matchup is set to be played in Chapel Hill. If you’re in some sort of office pool where you absolutely have to pick an upset, you might consider #11 Fairfield over #6 Notre Dame, but you’ll find better 11-6 opportunities in the other regions. It’s only a 19 percent chance for Fairfield — still, that’s higher than UConn’s chances of losing at any point before the Final Four.
Let’s go to the Sacramento 4 region, which the winner of Fort Worth 1 will play in the national semifinal in Phoenix. There are some better early-round matchups out in Gold Country: