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Best ACC Home Court Advantage From 2001-2011

slothrop

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Was Wake Forest, according to Duke Hoop Blog.


Cumulative Rankings

Wake Forest 18
Virginia 21
Maryland 24
FSU 27
Georgia Tech 30
Duke 33
NCSU 35
VA Tech 36
UNC 36
Miami 37
Clemson 39
BC 43

"Methodology

Using data culled from TeamRankings.com, I evaluated the following statistics for all 12 teams in the ACC (Boston College, Clemson, Duke, Georgia Tech, Maryland, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Florida State, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Miami, Wake Forest).

Home Win Percentage vs Away Win Percentage
Home Points Per Game vs Away Points Per Game
Home Defensive Points Per Game vs Away Defensive Points Per Game
Home Free Throw Percentage vs Away Free Throw Percentage
Home Defensive Free Throw Percentage vs Away Defensive Free Throw Percentage

At first glance, these stats are ones that I wouldn’t even begin to use to tell a story of how a basketball team was performing. Stats guys like John Gasaway and Ken Pomeroy have done a good job of explaining why points per game is a useless stat and defensive free throw percentage is a number that really can’t be affected by the team not shooting the ball (barring a player or coach screaming while the other team is shooting). However, we’re not trying quantify what team has been better in a particular season or how a team is likely to perform in the NCAA Tournament. This study is only attempting to quantify home court advantage in a relatively meaningful way."
 
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I still haven't seen a good study that distinguishes home court advantage from road court disadvantage.
 
I agree, Ph, DHB mentioned that Clemson won zero games away from Littlejohn in 2004. None. Couple that with our road woes under Dino, and [Redacted]'s major conference road woes, and you start to see a pattern that maybe teams just play better at home because they aren't on the road. A lot more is in your control, then.
 
Yeah. Whenever this discussion goes around, I spend at minute or two thinking of the best way to put together such as study that doesn't overrely on neutral court games which often aren't really neutral. My primary thought is that the home and road effects vary greatly by school. If we could establish a floor or minimum effect of being on the home and on the road, that would be a start.
 
The problem is you don't play enough true neutral court games in a year to establish a sample size large enough to formulate a control group. It just makes it tough to determine your variables from that.
 
That's why you have to do it without a control group. The best thing I think of is coding each game as a home and road game and the location. I'd love to get all that data.
 
PH, while it won't help with determining home court on an individual team basis, there are a couple of very interesting chapters in the book 'Scorecasting', written by a couple of professors such as yourself about the existence of home field advantage in sports and their causes. It's an awesome book and got rave reviews across the spectrum from Mark Cuban to Steven Levitt of Freakanomics.
 
Couldn't you just look at how visiting teams perform in your arena vs their other away games? I know KenPom and others calculate predicted stats for each game based on the teams' strengths and weaknesses. So you'd just look at how the away team does relative to their projected stats in each of their away games. If every ACC team has their worst adjusted away-game statistical performance in your arena, I think you'd have the "best home court advantage," no?
 
I'm telling yall, that game in 2005 when UNC came to town...nothing has been louder in my CBB experience. That was IMPRESSIVE.
 
ETA: IAI beat me to it but here it is...

Did anyone see Pomeroy's insider post on ESPN on HCA that tackles some of these aforementioned issues?

Myths of home-court advantage
Think Kansas holds the biggest home edge? Kentucky? Duke? Guess again

When fans think of the most difficult venues for road teams, they think of places like Cameron Indoor Stadium and Allen Fieldhouse -- loud, raucous venues that both stun the visitors and energize the home team. And indeed the home courts of Duke and Kansas certainly meet those criteria, and the Blue Devils and Jayhawks win a very high percentage of games there.

The same is true for the owners of the nation's longest active home-court winning streaks -- Kentucky, Ohio State and North Carolina. But there's more to home-court advantage than just the home crowd. Much more.

For starters, the thing that all of these teams above have in common is that they're very good. In discussing home-court advantage, it's important to clarify something: Home-court advantage is not just how well a team plays at home. The "advantage" is how much a team's home court adds to its performance relative to its performance on the road.

So rather than simply looking at teams' home margins of victory, we're looking at their home scoring margins compared to their road scoring margins.

If you're keen for a little more detail on my methodology, check out the sidebar to the right. But if you're eager to jump ahead and see which college teams enjoy the biggest boosts at home, take a look at the list below. The results will surprise you.


The team with the biggest differential between home and road scoring margin during this time is … drumroll please … Utah Valley! I know I could have given you a few hundred guesses before you came up with the Wolverines.

But believe it or not, in 58 games they outscored opponents by 745 points at home and were outscored by 105 points on the road for an average home-court advantage of 7.33 points. UVU leads a top 10 that isn't exactly a who's who of teams playing in feared venues.

15pooxy.jpg


There are some major conference schools here, including three from the SEC, but I don't think these are the teams anyone expected to see. You can also see that the more famous schools mentioned earlier are a long way from the top of these rankings.

The list might not make sense at first glance, and there's clearly still a lot of noise here. For instance, I'm not inclined to believe that Alabama truly enjoys four more points of home-court advantage than Kentucky, and if we had a few dozen more games of data perhaps we'd see less of a difference. But amid the chaos, there is an interesting signal here, as well.

First, let's consider what makes up home-court advantage. I think there are four things that give the road team a disadvantage: altitude, travel, unfamiliarity with the surroundings and hostile fans. Based on this study, I also think that's their order of importance.

By my count, there are 15 Division I programs whose home court is at an elevation above 4,000 feet. As a group those teams appear to benefit from a considerable home-court advantage. Of the 15, 12 have a home court rated in the top 100 by this method, and six are in the top 30. Road teams clearly have trouble adjusting to thin air.

Since almost all of the data used here involves conference games, travel doesn't play a big role in this analysis. But consider that three of the most isolated teams in America relative to their conference -- Utah Valley, Denver and Hawaii -- appear in the top 10. It's also worth mentioning that UVU and Denver play their home games at high elevation. Altitude and travel are such a killer for the opponents of the Wolverines and Pioneers that I expect they could play in an empty campus gym and enjoy a considerable home-court advantage.

Of course, we associate home-court advantage most strongly with fan support. But in my home court four factors, I'm making a distinction between hostile fans and lack of familiarity with one's surroundings. I do this because most arenas are not filled with rabid fans on a given night, and yet some sort of home-court advantage exists everywhere.

Ranking the conferences by home-court advantage provides some insight to this distinction. If you assume that schools from the power conferences have the most interest among their fans, the home-court advantage observed in those conferences should be higher if the crowd truly has a large influence. Indeed, the Big 12 and Big Ten own the top two spots in conference home-court advantage, but there are still some peculiarities in this list -- like the MAC being third and the Big Sky being sixth. Also, the Big East is an uninspiring 14th and the Pac-12 is 18th.

It appears there's at best a loose relationship between fan support and home-court advantage. That leads me to believe that from the road team's perspective, dealing with unfamiliar surroundings is just as difficult as dealing with hostile fans.

That's not to say that fans don't play a role, of course. Considering that altitude and lengthy travel are non-factors in most games and that the typical home-court advantage is around four points, an active crowd may control a point or two of home-court advantage. But the bigger impact of a rocking arena is simply making it a fun place for the home team to play, which undoubtedly influences the level of talent that can be recruited to join the team that plays there.

There's no doubt that Cameron Indoor and Allen Fieldhouse are among the nation's most difficult home courts. But that has much more to do with the talent on the host teams than the home-court advantage at each location. As silly as it sounds, the buildings providing the most advantage to their hosts are likely Magness Arena in Denver and the UCCU Center in Orem, Utah.

The lesson of this investigation is that while strong fan support surely has long-term benefits, the ultimate home-court advantage on game day resides in thin air and long distances traveled.
 
That one of the things that pisses me off so bad about the current state of basketball affairs. We had a great home court advantage. I've got a picture from the 2009 game vs. UNC, and it is beautiful. A full Joel Coliseum and you have to look pretty hard at the picture to pick out the random UNC fans. In 2 short years, it's been pissed away. It's like the lifeblood has been almost completely sucked out of our basketball program. Bzzz isn't the only reason for it, there are at least a few, but it sucks!!!
 
There's this, too: http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/12...advantageous-is-home-field-advantage-and-why/

“Football Freakonomics”: How Advantageous Is Home-Field Advantage? And Why?
STEPHEN J. DUBNER
12/18/2011 | 9:05 am
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The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project.

Do home teams really have an advantage?
Absolutely. In their book Scorecasting, Toby Moscowitz and Jon Wertheim helpfully compile the percentage of home games won by teams in all the major sports. Some data sets go back further than others (MLB figures are since 1903; NFL figures are “only” from 1966, and MLS since 2002), but they are all large enough to be conclusive:
League Home Games Won
MLB 53.9%
NHL 55.7%
NFL 57.3%
NBA 60.5%
MLS 69.1%
So it’s hard to argue against the home-field advantage. In fact my Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt once wrote an academic paper about the wisdom of betting (shh!) on home underdogs (more here).
But why does that advantage exist? There are a lot of theories to consider, including:
“Sleeping in your own bed” and “eating home cooking”
Better familiarity with the home field/court
Crowd support
Those all make sense, don’t they? In Scorecasting, Moscowitz and Wertheim compile data to test a variety of popular theories. You might be surprised (and maybe even disappointed) to read their conclusion:
When athletes are at home, they don’t seem to hit or pitch better in baseball … or pass better in football. The crowd doesn’t appear to be helping the home team or harming the visitors. We checked “the vicissitudes of travel” off the list. And although scheduling bias against the road team explains some of the home-field advantage, particularly in college sports, it’s irrelevant in many sports.
So if these popular explanations don’t have much explanatory power for home-field advantage, what does?
In a word: the refs. Moscowitz and Wertheim found that home teams essentially get slightly preferential treatment from the officials, whether it’s a called third strike in baseball or, in soccer, a foul that results in a penalty kick. (It’s worth noting that a soccer referee has more latitude to influence a game’s outcome than officials in other sports, which helps explain why the home-field advantage is greater in soccer, around the world, than in any other pro sport.)
Moscowitz and Wertheim also make clear, however, an important nuance: official bias is quite likely involuntary.
What does this mean? It means that officials don’t consciously decide to give the home team an advantage — but rather, being social creatures (and human beings) like the rest of us, they assimilate the emotion of the home crowd and, once in a while, make a call that makes a whole lot of close-by, noisy people very happy.
One of the most compelling (and cleverest) arguments in favor of this theory comes from a research paper by Thomas Dohmen about home-field advantage in Germany’s Bundesliga, the country’s top soccer league.
Dohmen found that home-field advantage was smaller in stadiums that happened to have a running track surrounding the soccer pitch, and larger in stadiums without a track.
Why?
Apparently, when the crowd sits closer to the field, the officials are more susceptible to getting caught up in the home-crowd emotion. Or, as Dohmen puts it:
The social atmosphere in the stadium leads referees into favoritism although being impartial is optimal for them to maximize their re-appointment probability.
So it looks like crowd support does matter – but not in the way you might have thought. Keep this in mind next time you’re shouting your brains out at a football game. Just make sure you know who you’re supposed to be shouting at.
 
The Pomeroy piece highlights another reason why falling in love with Bz based on Air Force beating a bad Wake team was ridiculous.

I heard the Freakonomics podcast on NFL home field. Definitely think officials play a role in basketball, but that's harder to quantify in hoops.
 
My head almost exploded the first time they played Zombie Nation during the 2003 Duke 2OT game.

Those were the days./
 
The Pomeroy piece highlights another reason why falling in love with Bz based on Air Force beating a bad Wake team was ridiculous. I heard the Freakonomics podcast on NFL home field. Definitely think officials play a role in basketball, but that's harder to quantify in hoops.

That could be a lot of the reason Wellman hired him, I mean there sure isn't many other plausible ones.
 
I'm telling yall, that game in 2005 when UNC came to town...nothing has been louder in my CBB experience. That was IMPRESSIVE.

Anyone know where to get a recording of that game?
 
That one of the things that pisses me off so bad about the current state of basketball affairs. We had a great home court advantage. I've got a picture from the 2009 game vs. UNC, and it is beautiful. A full Joel Coliseum and you have to look pretty hard at the picture to pick out the random UNC fans. In 2 short years, it's been pissed away. It's like the lifeblood has been almost completely sucked out of our basketball program. Bzzz isn't the only reason for it, there are at least a few, but it sucks!!!

That's what happens with winning. If the WF team were to start 20-0 next season and be ranked in the top 5 with a home game against UNC or Duke up then the Joel would look exactly like it would in CP's years and in 2009.
 
Scott Wood's struggles at the line made me think about this. Has anybody come across a study of home court advantage (or road court disadvantage) that includes FT shooting by players? That's the one constant from building to building from game to game. Every shot is from the same place on the court, but everything else changes.
 
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