College basketball betting systems have grown from expert handicappers trying to get an advantage for the upcoming March Madness tournament, to casual fans attempting to become more knowledgeable on the sport. One of the best college sports betting systems on the planet is the AOPR system in which the skill of your favorite team’s opponents is assessed. Here is how it looks!

AOPR stands for average opponent power rating. A power rating system in essence is a numerical rating of one team to the next. This is the precursor in football to that of the presently used BCS system which ranks the top 25 teams in the country. For instance if Duke has a power rating of 90 and USC has a power rating of 80, we are led to believe that Duke is the better team by 10 points.

Basically the AOPR can be calculated by adding the power rating of each opponent and dividing by the number of games. Here is how this would look for UCLA.

In three games UCLA has played the following teams with the following power rankings.

Michigan (83)
UCONN (92)
Penn St. (89)

AOPR for UCLA = 83+92+89 = 264/ 3 = 88

Therefore UCLA has an AOPR of 88.

Although an effective way to determine your team’s chances against another, AOPR can be rather time consuming once you reach the end of the schedules is reached. As a result, many sports magazines have created their own power ranking systems for handicappers to reference. What you should know however is that the sports magazines are essentially calculating the AOPR on your behalf and calling it their own systems. Some magazines, will use the AOPR, however they will create their own power rating to put a spin on the calculations. It is important that before referencing one of these systems, you consult a variety of other magazines.