HD player still in my first season here, and I have a question about home court advantage. Last night, my 18-6 Chicago team in Tark lost to a 7-17 St. Lawrence team at St. Lawrence by double digits. Obviously I'm trying to figure out why my team suffered a loss to this team in the first place (let alone an 11 point blowout) when I was favored by 26 in the contest, and I feel like home court advantage is probably a significant part of it.

How much of an advantage is home court advantage? Do major upsets happen on the road all the time in this game? Obviously this particular upset seems almost unrealistic (though it's about on par with Cornell losing at Penn in real life this year); should I expect such road upsets each year in HD or do they happen once in a blue moon?

Thanks in advance for any responses as always!

When 'weird' results happen, its almost always a good team losing on the road to a bad team.

I am 206-47 at home (81.4%) and 174-64 on the road (73.1%) and I have probably played stronger teams at home over my career. So HCA is worth 4-8 points and a least a 10% chance of winning in my opinion.

My personal opinion (and note, this is an opinion) is that home court advantage matters A LOT more in D1 than in D2 or D3. Partly being that it's very difficult to get your HCA up to a level in D2 and nearly impossible to get it to a level in D3 where it actually amounts to more than a couple of points of an advantage. Is there a small advantage at those levels? Probably, but probably not enough to worry about. D1, totally different animal.

Just took a quick look at your game, and obviously the reason you lost was because you shot 27% from the field. Not gonna win many games that way. Why did you shoot 27%? Hard to say, but it may have been one of those games where the shots just didn't drop.

I don't like to use that excuse/answer because, being a numbers guy, I think that the engine should follow the ratings closer than it does, with less "randomness", so to speak. But the engine is what it is, and sometimes you just get a bad roll of the RNG dice. It sucks when this happens (and wait until it happens to you in an NT game where you're favored. You think you're upset now, ha!), but there's really not a whole lot you can do about it due to the limited options we have available to us as coaches.

The best advice I ever took off of these forums is this: No matter what you do, there will always be the possibility that your team will get beat, even when you're the far more talented team. The best thing we can do from a coaching standpoint is to try to limit those occasions through the few options we have available to us. In other words, do your best to decrease the odds of that upset happening. Can you guarantee a win 100% of the time? Obviously not, but you can get it really close to that and that comes through experience, trial and error, and solid game planning. I don't think you did anything blatantly wrong in your game, I think it just wasn't your night. And like I said earlier, it sucks when that happens........

"Why did you shoot 27%? Hard to say, but it may have been one of those games where the shots just didn't drop. "

As much as it hurts, emy1013 was right on target with that statement. I would like to add, though, that IMHO this type of thing happens in HD just about the same % it happens in RL. Whether you're playing HD or coaching/watching your favorite RL team there are nights when the ball just flat won't fall, and yes, it sucks when it happens but it's also part of what makes sports in general what it is.

Thanks for the advice, guys. Yeah, obviously you're not going to win many games when your teams shoots that horribly, so I guess there was just a degree of bad luck thrown in there plus maybe a slight home court factor. I'm sure as I play the game more and more I'll get used to these occurrences... fortunately this didn't totally kill my NT chances so hopefully I can still pick up the pieces.

Yeah I get used to 1-2 weird bad results and 1-2 weird good results per season...hopefully they even out.

i never get "weird good" results

well, i guess i should never say never....

so lets say once every 6 or 8 seasons i get a resukt that surprises me in a good way.

Well, once you get good Dave, you have less games that you should loss, and more games you should win so that is expected.

When you suck at this game, you have more opportunities to win unexpectedly.