Betting on March Madness without consulting the Pomeroy Ratings, better known as "KenPom," is like showing up to cut down a tree without a chainsaw. You can still get the job done with other tools, but you're making the work a lot harder than it needs to be.
Over the past couple of decades, all but a small handful of National Champions have ranked inside the top 20 in KenPom's adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency metrics, a track record that's made the site a go-to tool for handicapping who has a realistic shot at cutting down the nets. The same data that helps forecast title contenders can also be applied game by game, which is where it becomes genuinely useful for regular-season and tournament betting alike.
What are the KenPom Ratings?
Found free at Kenpom.com (with an optional paid subscription for deeper data), the KenPom Ratings are trusted by handicappers and coaches alike, yet still fly under the radar for a lot of newer bettors. The site is named after statistician Ken Pomeroy, who built a system to rank all Division 1 men's college basketball teams using advanced efficiency metrics.
Three numbers anchor the whole system: Adjusted Efficiency Margin (AdjEM), Adjusted Offensive Efficiency (AdjO), and Adjusted Defensive Efficiency (AdjD). The word "adjusted" is doing real work in each of those names, since it means the underlying numbers have been corrected for strength of schedule. If Team A and Team B post identical stats, but Team A padded its numbers against a soft schedule while Team B earned its against strong competition, Team B comes out ranked higher to reflect that difference.
A fourth metric, Adjusted Tempo (AdjT), measures possessions per 40 minutes and shows how fast or slow a team plays. The fastest teams in the country can push well above 74 possessions per 40 minutes, while the slowest can dip into the low 60s, a meaningful gap once you start projecting how a matchup might unfold.
Enjoying Covers content? Add us as a preferred source on your Google account
How to use the KenPom Ratings
Tempo is the natural starting point for totals bettors, since it directly forecasts pace and the number of scoring opportunities each team will get. Two slow-tempo teams point toward a lower-scoring game, since both sides get fewer possessions to work with. Two fast-tempo teams suggest the opposite.
Tempo becomes even more useful once you start layering in other data points. A slow, turnover-prone team facing an opponent that forces a lot of takeaways points toward a game with even fewer clean scoring chances than tempo alone would suggest, and combining that with each team's field-goal percentage starts to paint a real picture of expected scoring output.
Subscribers get an extra layer of detail on every team page, including a full point-distribution breakdown showing how a team scores and allows points across three-pointers, two-pointers, and free throws. A team that leans heavily on free-throw scoring against an opponent that rarely fouls is exactly the kind of mismatch worth flagging before a bet.
For bettors building same-game parlays, KenPom's player-level data at the bottom of each team page is worth a look too. Players are broken down by usage rate and ranked nationally in categories like offensive rebound percentage, defensive rebound percentage, block percentage, and steal percentage, giving prop bettors a fast way to identify which players are actually driving a team's numbers.
The matchup pages go even deeper. Click the projected final score for any game and you'll get a full side-by-side breakdown, average height, experience, bench minutes, and more, color-coded so green means a team's strong there and red means it's not. Scan the colors and the mismatches jump right out at you.
Identifying March Madness dark horses
KenPom's numbers tend to get sharper as the season goes on simply because there's more data to work with, which makes late-season and tournament application especially valuable.
Once the bracket is set, look for teams ranked well in either Adjusted Offensive or Defensive Efficiency but seeded lower than that efficiency would suggest. Those are exactly the teams capable of catching a higher seed off guard.
Loyola Chicago's run to the 2018 Final Four came from a squad with a top-20 defensive efficiency ranking that nobody outside the analytics crowd saw coming. North Carolina's run to the 2022 title game as an 8-seed was backed by a top-30 offense per KenPom, and South Carolina's surprise 2017 Final Four trip rode a top-five defense by the same measure.
A strong KenPom ranking is far from a guarantee, and plenty of highly rated teams have flamed out early in the tournament too. But these numbers are one of the better tools available for spotting which underdogs have the underlying profile to make a real run if the shooting variance breaks their way.
Putting it together
KenPom won't hand you winning picks on its own, but it gives bettors a faster, more objective read on team strength than box scores or seed lines alone. Pairing its efficiency and tempo data with matchup-specific research, and checking it against other tools, is one of the simplest ways to sharpen your college basketball handicapping heading into March.
KenPom Ratings FAQs
KenPom refers to Kenpom.com, a college basketball analytics site built by statistician Ken Pomeroy. It ranks all Division 1 men's teams using efficiency metrics adjusted for strength of schedule, and it's widely used by handicappers and coaches to evaluate team strength.
AdjO and AdjD are Adjusted Offensive and Defensive Efficiency, measuring points scored or allowed per 100 possessions after correcting for opponent strength. AdjT is Adjusted Tempo, which shows how many possessions per 40 minutes a team plays, a key input for projecting game pace and totals.
Look for teams with strong offensive or defensive efficiency rankings but a seed lower than that efficiency suggests. Loyola Chicago's 2018 Final Four run and South Carolina's 2017 run both came from teams whose KenPom numbers outpaced their seeding.
Yes, the core ratings and rankings are free at Kenpom.com. A paid subscription unlocks additional detail, including point-distribution breakdowns and deeper matchup data for each team.
