TruRanking is a fully automated analytics system for NCAA Division I men's basketball. Every rating, prediction, bracket projection, and tournament simulation on this site is produced by the same underlying model, updated daily as new game results are processed. There is no human polling, no subjective input, and no manual adjustment. The sections below explain how each part of the system works.

Tempo-Free Efficiency Ratings

The foundation of every number on this site is a tempo-free efficiency model. Rather than looking at raw points scored and allowed, the model evaluates each team on a per-possession basis. This removes the distortion caused by pace: a team that plays fast will naturally have higher raw scoring totals than a team that slows the game down, but that difference says nothing about how well either team actually plays. Measuring efficiency per 100 possessions puts every team on equal footing.

Offensive efficiency is the number of points a team scores per 100 possessions. Defensive efficiency is the number of points a team allows per 100 possessions. The gap between the two, known as efficiency margin, is one of the strongest indicators of overall team quality in college basketball. A team that scores 110 points per 100 possessions while allowing only 95 has a +15 efficiency margin, regardless of whether their games typically end 85-72 or 65-58.

Strength of Schedule

Raw efficiency numbers need context. A team posting strong offensive numbers against weak competition is not the same as a team doing it against top-tier defenses. The TruRanking model addresses this through strength of schedule (SOS) adjustment, which accounts for the quality of every opponent a team has faced during the season.

Each team's SOS is derived from the aggregate ratings of all opponents on their schedule. Beating a highly-rated opponent produces more movement in a team's rating than beating a low-rated one. Losses to strong teams carry less penalty than losses to weak ones. This ensures that teams playing in demanding conferences or facing tough non-conference schedules are not penalized for taking on difficult competition, and that teams running up records against weaker fields do not receive inflated ratings.

The Rating Formula

A team's overall TruRanking rating combines its offensive efficiency, defensive efficiency, and strength of schedule into a single number on a normalized scale. This composite score represents the model's best estimate of that team's current quality. The Full Rankings page displays each team's overall rating alongside its component metrics, so you can see not just where a team ranks but why it ranks there. Ratings update daily after all games from the previous day have been processed.

Game Predictions

The Prediction Center provides daily game-by-game forecasts for every Division I matchup. Each prediction starts by taking the TruRanking rating differential between the two teams and applying a home-court advantage adjustment for the host team. That adjusted differential is then fed into a logistic regression model that has been calibrated on thousands of historical college basketball outcomes.

The logistic model converts the rating gap into a win probability for each team. Projected scores are generated by combining each team's offensive efficiency against the opponent's defensive efficiency, scaled to the expected game pace. The result is a tempo-neutral, matchup-specific forecast that reflects both overall team quality and how each team's strengths and weaknesses interact. Where market lines are available, the Prediction Center also shows how the model's projected spread compares to the consensus, highlighting games where the model sees the most divergence.

Monte Carlo Tournament Simulation

TruTourney uses Monte Carlo simulation to estimate each team's probability of advancing through every round of the NCAA Tournament. In each simulation, every tournament game is resolved by converting the TruRanking rating differential between the two teams into a win probability using the same logistic model that powers the Prediction Center. A random number draw then determines the winner, and the bracket advances round by round until a champion is crowned.

By repeating this process over 10,000 times, the simulator generates stable probability estimates for each team reaching the Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite Eight, Final Four, Championship Game, and winning it all. A team listed at 12% championship odds means it won the title in roughly 1,200 out of 10,000 simulations. Because the simulation respects actual bracket structure, a strong team drawn into a difficult region may show lower advancement odds than a similarly-rated team in an easier draw. Before Selection Sunday, TruTourney simulates using the TruBrackets projected field. After the official bracket is released, it switches to the real matchups, and during the tournament, completed games are locked in so probabilities update in real time.

Automated Bracketology

TruBrackets projects the NCAA Tournament Field of 68 entirely from the ratings. The system identifies one automatic qualifier from each of the 31 Division I conferences by selecting the highest-rated team in each league as the projected conference champion. The remaining at-large spots are filled by taking the next-best available teams by overall TruRanking rating, regardless of conference.

Once the 68-team field is set, seeds are assigned across four regions based on overall rating rank. The top four teams receive No. 1 seeds, the next four receive No. 2 seeds, and so on. The First Four matchups pair the last four at-large selections and the lowest-rated automatic qualifiers against each other. A Bubble Watch section highlights teams on the edge of selection, showing the Last Four In and First Four Out as they shift with each day's results.

What Makes TruRanking Different

TruRanking is the only site that provides daily updates across all of the following from a single integrated system: team efficiency ratings, NCAA bracket projections, game-by-game predictions with spread analysis, best bets, historical season tracking, and NCAA Tournament pool management. Most analytics sites offer one or two of these features. TruRanking connects them all through one consistent model, so the same ratings that drive the rankings also power the predictions, which feed into the bracketology, which seeds the tournament simulations. Nothing is siloed, nothing conflicts, and everything updates together.

The system is fully automated with no human polling or subjective bias. Rankings are built exclusively on game-level efficiency data and strength of schedule, producing purely analytical assessments that complement poll-based systems like the AP Top 25 and Coaches Poll. For a deeper look at the basketball analytics concepts used throughout this site, see the Glossary. For answers to common questions, visit the FAQ.