Ken Pomeroy calculates the home court advantage of all college teams based on their last 60 conference road and home games. Every Gator thinks that the O'Dome/Exactech Center is a "House of Horrors" but the Gators come in dead last in the SEC for home court advantage in his metric. Maybe my wife has been correct for years saying that we don't get the same level of "home cooking" as the other teams in the league.
I would guess that Kentucky is first. Vandy should be ranked near the top with their home court set up.
Tennessee is #1 in the SEC and the Hawgs second with UK not far behind. All three are WAY up in the overall rankings. I would have thought Arky and UK would be #1 and #2 and UT third.
Based on my limited exposure to the basketball fan bases of UT, UK and Arky I would say that the Arky fan base is the most rabid, the UK fan base is the most entitled and the UT fan base is the most classless. One year after we beat UT in a very early SEC game at the O'Dome and UT had a bus load of fans coming back from some south Florida bowl game one Gator fan did the CHOMP at the bus and an old "lady" gave him the middle digit. But they do support their teams.
Y’all have named three tough places to play, but this year we are pretty resilient. Hopefully we can win on the road this year in these rabid holes.
Hopefully being a better team improves this. Is this a long term metric, or just based on this year’s tiny sample? Haven’t had too many home games to energize or get a big crowd, so an “in season” metric is basically meaningless at this point. Over the longer term White lost waayyyy to many games at home. So it’s not surprising we wouldn’t show much home court advantage. I think we’ll have good rowdy crowds in league play, so hopefully that results in us getting back to being much better defending home court.
Guys, This is based on 60 conference games and not just a few games this year. Reading is fundamental.
So basically Mike White era and Golden’s 1/3 schedule without Castleton? I noted many times on here how many L’s White was racking up at home, so to see it in a multi-year stat is not surprising. I think at one point I went through how many times White had matched or exceeded Donovan’s worst mark for home losses. He might have done it successive years in a row until he was mercifully let go (I can’t remember exactly and don’t feel like going through the records again, but the point is it was bad). Obviously we don’t have a great fanbase, but a coach playing that style is a double whammy of boring fans to death and exposing a team to surprising losses in low scoring games.
I did not read it close enough. Not sure that shows how much the home court advantage was as much as who the best teams have been. Maybe with Arkansas it does. I was thinking Vandy because the court always gave Florida problems. That said if they are bad it will not show up as wins that often
I assume it attempted to calculate a disparity between home and road performance? So even bad teams that get swept on the road could show a “home court advantage” if they won a few home games. Whites teams were just weird in that any time their backs were against the wall. They’d pull out huge win (often on the road!) and you’d think they were back on the right side of the bubble. Then they’d almost invariably lose their next two. Whether these games were home or away never seemed to matter. Inexplicable stuff that breaks analytics.
Kentucky has the best following in the U.S. and no other school is close. Rupp is a very large facility that is usually sold out; however, UK only has a couple thousand UK students in the house. Other teams have their students around the floor which makes it a tough win, but at UK the students are only on one end (the eruption zone). Most of the folks on the sidelines are season ticket holders. That is bad for Kentucky having any massive home court advantage unless it is a rivalry game when the old folks, like me, wake up. As @GatorLurker said "Arky fan base is the most rabid, the UK fan base is the most entitled and the UT fan base is the most classless". I can't argue with that except that UK's fan base does not feel "entitled". I am 77 years old and I have been a life long fan of UK basketball and football. Entitled is not the word. We old UK fans live in fear of being beaten! We like to win and these other teams represent a constant threat to us winning! No UK fans feels that winning is owed to us, far from it.
Yep these kinds of metrics are all about winning. If you don’t win, by definition you don’t have a home court advantage. See the Swamp also for context. Conversely both places are the absolute best in the country when we win. I’d put either atmosphere up against anyone when we are winning. “Wes Chandler was Percy Harvin before Percy Harvin was born.”
The O’Dome has not been as rabid as 10 years ago and for awhile now we haven’t been as good. I’m sure those two are related.
In the smart phone age, O-Dome just doesn't have the energy it once had. Not even close. All the students are looking at their phones and not watching the game. And the alumni have always been sticks in the mud.
No doubt. But I think the dead last rank has more to do with White’s habit of flukey wins and losses.
