Home court advantage in the Strength power rating fell again, down to 2.85. This isn't a crazy value, it's near the 3.00 norm, but it was 2.98 two days ago—dropping 0.13 points in just 2 days is weird.
The same thing happened just last week, when it fell from 3.15 to 3.00. What's going on with home teams?
Tuesday night saw some big upsets of home teams:
- Louisville beat SMU 98-73: this was a big one, the Cards not just winning but by 25 points
- Wake Forest beat North Carolina 67-66: this one hardly affected things as UNC was a very slim favorite
- Ohio State 73, Purdue 70: The Boilermakers were favored by around 7 in Strength
- St. Joseph's 78, Davidson 61: A 17-point win on an upset on the road
- George Mason 75, St. Bonaventure 62: A 13-point upset win at St. Bon's house
- Arizona State 65, West Virginia 57: About a 15-point swing
- Minnesota 72, Iowa 67: Another 15-point swing
- Kent State 83, Toledo 64: About a 20-point swing on this one
- Wyoming 63, UNLV 61: Another 10+ point swing
- Ball State 83, Central Michigan 68: Small swing here, <10 points
Of the 11 upsets based on Ken Pomeroy's ratings, 10 were upsets of home teams. And in some cases, favored road teams won by a lot more than expected, like Dayton beating Duquesne by 20 (favored by 10), and BYU (favored by 5) topping Colorado by 16.
In other cases, home teams that avoided upsets didn't win by what they were supposed to; UConn (favored by 12) needed overtime to beat Butler.
The effect of this was to lower HCA by 0.15 points in 2 days, and around 0.30 points in the last week or so!
Is something going on or are home teams just sluggish when students are coming back to school? Looking at last year's HCA over the same time period, it went from 3.27 on January 14, 2024 to 3.17 on January 21, 2024, a decent drop but only 1/3 as large as this year. It did fall to 2.89 by the end of the season, but was 3.35 in 2023, so it does vary from year to year.
But usually not so much week to week!
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