Sunday, March 11, 2012

Bracket Advice #1: Home Beasts vs Road Warriors

I'll be talking about several different factors for selecting your bracket, but one is just looking at how well the teams played at home versus on the road. Some teams are just much better at home, and those teams will tend to struggle in the NCAA Tournament.

This year I wanted some objective way to list the teams most dependent on home court, and so I decided to calculate the home vs road scoring differential in conference play, done in a tempo-free fashion. So I have calculated their PPP (points per possession) scored and allowed in their home and road conference games, then took the scoring differential, and subtracted home from road. The teams at the top of the list below are the biggest home beasts. The teams at the bottom of the list are the biggest road warriors.

First, let me give you the list, and then I'll talk more about it below. Click on the image below to expand it so you can read it without super-human eye sight:

Home Beasts
Road Warriors

Just a quick explanation of this. None of these stats are available anywhere I can find, so I did the calculating myself this afternoon. I used Pomeroy data. The reason why I used just conference data is because the schedule is more balanced. Non-conference schedules can be wildly uneven. Top teams from major conferences, for example, will typically line up a whole bunch of home games against cupcakes. I didn't want those games to skew the data.

The reason why I used PPP instead of total scoring or total record is because, as I've said many, many times, tempo-free stats are the best predictive stats. Teams could have had a few heartbreaking losses at home or on the road, and that shouldn't be used to make them look worse than they really are.

Obviously the sample size is limited. I wouldn't take it as gospel that Duke is the best road team in the country. But this is just something to keep in mind. If you're struggling to pick between two teams, and one of them has been awful away from road this season, pick against that team.

2 comments:

Sean said...

Unfortunately, even expanding the list still makes it nearly impossible to read unless you have superhuman eyesight!

Jeff said...

Try right-clicking and "open in a new tab/window". That is an alternative way to look at it.