What? You are making my point. We have only won 55% of our games over the past 18 years despite winning more than our fair share of close games...a higher percentage than the HOF coaches. Why? Because they don't rely on winning more of the close games. They have great players and win by big margins. Is it that unclear? What does having 5 different coaches have to do with my point?
I'm assuming that you're using this analysis to support the following claim that you made on the other thread:
The LOWF myth that we can't win close games without Chill and Timmy is just that...a myth. As fans, we are so invested in it that we suffer the close losses more than we celebrate the close wins.
The higher percentage doesn't really matter at all as far as I can tell. You're talking about 60.3% for Wake vs. 60% for Duke and 58% for UNC. Over that time UNC played 130 close games, Duke played 115, and we played 126. Given that nine different head coaches have produced those numbers with a lot of different configurations of players and talent, I'm not sure what the raw percentages/records actually do for you.
Each coach and lineup will probably "know how to win" differently, so aggregating results in games decided by 5 points or less and pointing to the fact that we win more games than Duke and UNC just doesn't really prove anything. Losing close games still sucks.
For this analysis to really mean anything, IMO, you would have to figure out what proportion of these games occur against meaningful competition; do we close out games that matter? Do we do this at a higher rate than UNC or Duke?
My hypothesis would be that Duke and Carolina have lesser winning percentages because they're in more close games against better competition. That, to me, is more impressive than winning more close games against lower ranked competition, as has been the case for the redacted and Manning-eras (I am not going to go back and figure out how Dino, Skip, and GDO fared).
Likewise and as others have pointed out, why do you artificially cap a close game at 5 points? There are plenty of close games played by all three teams that exceed that number.
All of this being said, knowing how to win is one of the stupider concepts that has emerged since I started posting on here. It's an intangible that a team has when it's winning and doesn't have when it's losing. Great.
We have choked a lot this year and we have choked a lot in high profile games in the past. Any Wake fan has experienced their share of heartbreaking close games (choke jobs or otherwise) at this point that more or less define our fandom in revenue sports. Whether we have won 76 games by five points or less doesn't make the close losses (including games like Duke and LVille that were decided by > 5 points) any less heartbreaking