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It's Tuesday, which means it's time for the latest installment of, "Does this ACC Matrix even mean anything?!"! Let's see what we've got this week.
You'll probably notice something off the bat - whoa! All of a sudden, it looks like the orange boxes are near the top, and the blue boxes are near the bottom! What happened?
In an attempt to make it a little more clear as to what's going on here, we've reordered the matrix such that the schools are ordered by their standings in conference. So what does this mean?
In an all-else-equal world, the whole matrix should be orange: if the teams are of equal strength, then the home team should always be winning. It's not a perfect world - teams like UVA are better than teams like Georgia Tech.
So, what you see in the matrix kind of makes sense. The top-right corner should be all orange, because you have a good team at home playing against a bad team. The bottom-left corner should be all blue, which means you have a good team on the road playing against a bad team, so you'd expect the road team to win.
And the stuff in the middle tracking the dark-grey line? Well, that's where you'd expect to see more orange, since you have two teams of similar records playing each other.
What we have here is 12 instances below the dark-grey line of somewhat of an upset - i.e., the home team, which has a worse record (even if by just a little bit) than the traveling team, wins. On the flip side, we have five instances above the dark-grey line in which the away team actually upset the higher-standing home team. This I find to be the more interesting number.
Each of Duke (@Virginia), Florida State (@Clemson) and Georgia Tech (@Miami) have one of these instances, while Miami has twice upset a better home team (@Duke and @Syracuse).
Meanwhile, among the top half of the conference, only Notre Dame, UNC, and Louisville have not dropped a home game to a team with a worse ACC record.
What other trends are you guys seeing here?