COOPER men's NCAA basketball ratings

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

🏀 Our latest COOPER ratings

April 2, 2026

We’ll continue to update these COOPER ratings throughout the tournament. But most of our commentary will be on the tournament forecast homepage. Tournament forecasts differ slightly from COOPER in that they blend COOPER with Pomeroy ratings and injury data. Still, COOPER itself has the unique attribute of having been calculated all the way back to 1950. —NS, 3/18/26

See also: Men’s March Madness projections, Women’s COOPER ratings, and Women’s March Madness projections.

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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 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.

Here are our current top 16 teams:

The rest of this page contains:

• COOPER ratings for all 365 men’s NCAA teams, tracking their high and low points over the course of the season;

• 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.