not sure how i feel about this, but just for comparison, another team in the opposite division, same conference:
northwestern
home: +15
away: +21
HCA: -6
indiana
home: +25
away: +38
HCA: +13
purdue
home: +8
away: +29
HCA: -21
illinois
home: +6
away: +10
HCA: -4
penn st
home: +10
away: +3
HCA: +7
well, my guess was our case would be less severe, because i know beyond reasonable doubt HCA is not as important as your very small sample size would suggest. i didn't expect it to be a great counter example, but i'll take it? overall, 3/5 we had negative benefit from HCA, and the average of the 5 differences is -2.2
i am stuck saying the same thing i say 75% of the time you make these statements - its not that i necessarily disagree with the premise, but the example shows nothing just on the raw sample size, and beyond that, there is no way it is significant as your example shows. you have to take these over a longer stretch to find something meaningful, picking out the outliers does nothing unless its part of an analysis on variance (standard deviations).
on this particular issue, i agree, HCA in high d1 is too meaningful. but its fairly subtle, i was sort of on an HCA kick for a while, did some research so i could demonstrate how far off it was. but compared to real life, it really didn't come out much different, maybe a point or two points tops. i think the real issue is the HCA spread, HCA figures in d1 are kind of nonsense, too many A+s and such, where there without-question should not be, winning is too big a factor. in the end, i came to the conclusion that while i personally don't like HCA meaning as much in HD as it does in RL, thats just an opinion, but if you try to model them the same, WIS did a pretty good job - on the value of HCA. its how they figure your HCA that is crap. that's just my take... but far more analysis went into that than 5 games :)