ACC College Basketball MATRIX: Home Court Advantage Showing Through

It's Tuesday, which means it's time for your updated ACC MATRIX. We're not even going to waste your time this week -- let's jump right into it:

Well, well, well. Look what's starting to show. As we've discussed in weeks past, now that the matrix is sorted by standing, in a perfect world, you'd expect to see everything above the dark gray line to be orange (because the home team is the better team), and everything below the gray line to be blue (because the away team is the better team). But, because the theory is that there is such a thing as a home court advantage, now we're expecting that there should be more orange in the bottom half (where the home team is the worse team, and pulls off the upset) than there is blue in the top half (road upsets).

And that's exactly what's starting to show up here. The matrix shows eight road upsets (FSU/Clemson shows up as a road upset, but both teams are 7-8) as compared to 15 home upsets -- visually, you can see that the orange is starting to push its way down the chart. Of the nine road upsets, three of them were barely upsets -- we'll describe them as being "one block" removed (i.e., one step away from the dark gray line). Those are games like 7-7 Miami upsetting 8-6 Syracuse, or 7-8 Clemson over 7-7 NC State. Games that are between two teams that are so close in standing that it's hardly really an upset. There are two games that are two blocks removed (Duke @ UVA, BC @ GT), two games that are four blocks removed, one five blocks removed and one six blocks removed. The five- and six-block games are the real outliers here...Pitt @ Syracuse and GT @ Miami, respectively.

On the other hand, of the 15 home upsets, five of them are one block removed. We'd expect to see a lot of these, since, if the two teams are evenly matched otherwise, you'd expect the home team to earn an edge. There's just one game that's two blocks removed, and three that are three blocks removed. In terms of your bigger home upsets, you have two four-block upsets, three five-block upsets, and then the big nine-block upset of Pitt taking down Notre Dame.

As the season wraps up, we'd expect to see the teams land in a spot where there's a little more orange around that gray line.