I went from Colgate to Mizzou this season and took over a program that is full of talent but coming off of a horrible season (4-23). My home court advantage was D+ on day 1. I'm turning things around pretty quick, as anyone would with this team. Started the new year off with my only loss, by 2 pts. to #3 Maryland in OT, then reeled off 9 straight wins on our way to a #13 ranking and a 10 RPI. With this kind of non con I would have thought my HCA would have gone higher than a C+. How long should it take to get to an A, and how many wins? Am I progressing at the correct speed? Thanks in advance!

Tough to go from D+ to an A in one season I think.

Might take 2 20 win years.

bd, you've gone up a full letter grade in HCA in just 10 games? Honestly, that's considerably faster than I think should be possible. How quickly do you want it to go up?!?!

go mizzou!

Exactly trobone.  Mizzou-rah!

Sorry guys, didn't mean to sound greedy, I just thought HCA moved very quickly, like 10 games or so. I mean, IRL if a Big-12 school was coming off of a 4-23 season and started off 9-1 and was ranked you wouldn't be able to buy a ticket! (LOL) I thought that would translate into a pretty high HCA, but I can understand why it doesn't. The school may be going nuts, and the HCA would improve, which mine has, but it would make sense that it would take a while for it to go as high as I was hoping for...A or A+. Anyway, thanks for the help & comments!

Think of it this way ... would a school like that immediately have an HCA equal to a powerhouse like Duke, UNC, etc? No way. Honestly, I would argue that HCA moves too quickly.

Looking at studies on real life HCA, if you take into account the competition, the HCA is not nearly as good as it looks at first glance.  All the Big , 6 teams bring in pansy directional (South West East Louisiana State, etc.) at the beginning of the season, so a .850 winning percentage needs to be corrected for the talent of the opponent.

When you correct for that, HCA is not really that impressive.  I think we should use only RL conference games to determine HCA .. which would likely be only a couple points a game.

Posted by hughesjr on 10/7/2010 12:40:00 PM (view original):
Looking at studies on real life HCA, if you take into account the competition, the HCA is not nearly as good as it looks at first glance.  All the Big , 6 teams bring in pansy directional (South West East Louisiana State, etc.) at the beginning of the season, so a .850 winning percentage needs to be corrected for the talent of the opponent.

When you correct for that, HCA is not really that impressive.  I think we should use only RL conference games to determine HCA .. which would likely be only a couple points a game.

I tend to agree that HD greatly exaggerates the effect of HCA. For last season (real-life), Sagarin calculated that HCA was worth 3.78 points, while Massey calculated it at 3.93 points (both are average values).

The best HCA in the nation last year according to Massey belonged to a 13-18 Oklahoma team... their HCA was calculated to be 5.98 points... only a couple points better than the average. Also in the Top 5 HCA were Missouri State and High Point. Meanwhile, Kentucky (#144) and Syracuse (#259), consistently the two highest attendance schools in college basketball, and both with great seasons last year, didn't even crack the Top 100 in HCA.

So it appears (at a quick first glance, anyway) that real-life HCA doesn't really correlate all that strongly with attendance or how good the team is. And the difference between the best HCA and the average HCA is only about 2 points, and between the best HCA and worst HCA is only 4.5 points. So the spread that HD uses is too wide if real-life is to be used as any comparison.

HCA has long been one of my pet peeves.  In my opinion, it's waaaaay too easy to get an impressive HCA in HD.  One man's opinion here, if HCA is gonna have ANY effect at all on the outcome of games, it needs to be far more difficult to achieve a high level HCA.

Agreed.