home field advantage: greatest in college basketball

From Darren Everson in the WSJ...

The road winning percentage in major men's college basketball is .340 -- meaning the road team wins roughly one out of every three games.

Somewhere on Earth there may be a sport in which this figure is lower. But it isn't the NBA, NHL, American or Australian football, English or Argentine soccer, Major League Baseball, Japanese baseball, Dominican winter baseball, or any of two dozen other sports leagues....

There's much debate about why this is. Paranoid fans blame referees. Coaches cite the inexperience of players, who tend to play more as freshmen and sophomores. Others say playing at home makes a team more resilient and less likely to pack it in during tough stretches....

One old theory is that this figure is skewed by all the games early in the year where the prominent schools invite weak opponents to their arenas, only to flog them. But even if one discards that portion of the season and counts only intraconference play, the resulting .380 road-winning figure is still below every other major U.S. team sport....

Another myth: that teams perform worse in enemy arenas because the unfamiliar sightlines affect their shooting. If that's true, then it would likely affect the women, too, who play in the same buildings. But the women's Division I road winning percentage this season is .378 -- significantly above that of the men.

Not that much above the men's! And the women don't shoot as well anyway!

Over the past 25 years, as college basketball has become a hot TV property, the way games are scheduled has changed. Whereas schools used to play on regular days of the week at standard times, they're now liable to play almost any night to accommodate ESPN or their own conference networks....

Indeed, the leagues in which road teams fare the best are often the ones that have made a point of maintaining steady routines....

The other, more evident reason is the debatable sanity of their student supporters....