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.
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.