We are favored tomorrow against the #9 team in the nation. I don’t care if it’s at home, on the road, underwater or on the moon. To me, that means this team is good enough to compete against anyone and is NCAA worthy. How many other bubble teams would be favored against the #9 team? Can’t be just architecture. Maybe the story shouldn’t be how bad our road record is but how weak the home court advantages are in these other leagues compared to the Big Ten. Anyone think our road record would be a lot better if we were playing road tilts at the Providence Civic Center or Conte Forum?
Favored by 1.5 Against Maryland
- Thread starter ColonelRutgers
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Would any other bubble team be favored against a top 10 team? Nope. Let's take care of business and make this a statement win
win the damn game and punch the ticket
As much as I love the RAC, our home court advantage is not that much greater than other teams.
We won a bunch of close games at home, and lost a bunch of them on the road. People will make up a lot of narratives around this but should not lose sight of how much of it is random chance.
Our efficiency numbers are much better than our record indicates. We are ranked #312 in luck in kenpom and #229 in bart.
We are favored simply because the team is good, and we are at home, but not because we are considered to have some huge home advantage that other teams do not.
We won a bunch of close games at home, and lost a bunch of them on the road. People will make up a lot of narratives around this but should not lose sight of how much of it is random chance.
Our efficiency numbers are much better than our record indicates. We are ranked #312 in luck in kenpom and #229 in bart.
We are favored simply because the team is good, and we are at home, but not because we are considered to have some huge home advantage that other teams do not.
Bro we have 17 wins at home and 1 win on the road how can you seriously try and discount our home court advantage?
Because there are ways to model that **** and they say our home court advantage is slightly over 4 points. In the same neighborhood as everyone else.
But people will explain that winning close games over ******* Nebraska and Northwestern at home and getting ganked at the last second at Penn St etc is b/c it's impossible to lose at home and impossible to win on the road.
Instead of writing Fooled by Randomness the dude should've just pointed people at this forum.
Ranked #312 in luck even in our best season in forever.... soooo Rutgers
In general I agree that extra rest helps, probably more in the second half. I also think too much rest makes you rusty, but the fact that we’re home and have so much to play for makes me feel confident.
This team plays at an elevated level at home vs on the road
Found a site
Rutgers is 6-2 with a rest advantage
5-1 with 4+ days off.
Maryland is 5-1 with a rest disadvantage
14-4 with 2-3 days off.
Rutgers 6-4 off a loss
Maryland 3-2 off a loss
Rutgers 17-1 Home(13-1 Home Favorite)
Maryland 5-5 Road(3-3 Away Dog)
Subtracting NW and Nebraska
Rest Advantage in Big 10 wins 72-44 62%
Rutgers is 6-2 with a rest advantage
5-1 with 4+ days off.
Maryland is 5-1 with a rest disadvantage
14-4 with 2-3 days off.
Rutgers 6-4 off a loss
Maryland 3-2 off a loss
Rutgers 17-1 Home(13-1 Home Favorite)
Maryland 5-5 Road(3-3 Away Dog)
Subtracting NW and Nebraska
Rest Advantage in Big 10 wins 72-44 62%
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You're making the same mistake that you're saying others make, which is making a statement that simply says too much which has the desired effect of rendering it impervious to criticism. Your argument in this thread is that others are claiming some sort of mythical advantage at home and a mythical disadvantage on the road, which you assail by saying that they are generalizing (i.e. they are making too much of an idea, and attributing it to the outcome).
I have no problem with the argument you are making against those who make a simplistic, non-cause-and-effect argument. But you are doing the same thing by assigning our outcomes to randomness, which is less precise than the argument those you assail are making. I made this point in another discussion you and I had, which is that "randomness" is not a cause-and-effect argument, it is a statement of the exact opposite, that things, such as the outcomes of our games, just happen, and that in Rutgers' games there is no correlation in any way to the dynamics impacting the outcome of home games versus away games. A simple assessment that all of the games were close and therefore nothing explains this other than randomness isn't enough to explain the disparity between the outcomes of games.
"Home-court advantage" is not precise enough--I agree with you on this, as it doesn't explain why we've done better at home than on the road. But "randomness" merely says, hey, there were sequences of events that gave rise to different point totals, and I'm not sure why these things happened the way they do so let's just call it a day and not look at the outcomes' proximate causes. You have to do better than a some sort of statistically-based statement that is akin to taking a sequence out of a strand of DNA and saying it merely happened that way. There's more to the picture than that.
It dont need useless stats or probability to see Rutgers has a bigger home court advantage with respect to their overall ability. The proof of that is their performance on the road
We're probably favored because Vegas factored in Senior Night. Let's start winning again at home and move forward. Should be a great game, but I hope we blow them out.
People's endless need to explain random fluctuations lead them to see things that aren't really there.
Like when from a sample size of 9 road games and 18 home you conclude that our home court advantage is way larger than others.. despite this not showing up in other seasons.
BTW, in conference play we are ranked #35 in adj efficiency on the road with a 1-8 record and... #29 at home with a 8-1 record.
My concern is do we play tight , knowing if we lose this game we may be out officially barring a few road and neutral wins . Jerry carino tweeted yesterday that pike put us through a tough *** practice and was all over our guys and was intense as he’s ever seen him and the guys in practice responded . Hopefully that carries over to the game
Just because we sucked or weren’t as good in previous seasons doesn’t mean we can’t have a pretty good home court advantage this year.
If "pretty good" home court advantage is what you believe then I completely agree with you.
Waited a longggg time to do it then. Maybe he was afraid to hurt the team psyche but sounds like they could have used this earlier
Maryland is a pretty solid team but they do rely heavily on their starters. They don't get a lot from their bench. To wit, only 6 players on their roster average more than 10 minutes per game with the starting five all averaging at least 27 minutes. Cowan could play all 40 minutes. This is their 4th game in 8 days . Meanwhile, RU is rested. So the formula should be to push tempo without getting too far out of our element, and being very physical. If we can wear them down toward the end, it could be the difference.
Then again, Scarlet Blind's post indicates Maryland does just fine on short rest. So who knows. Just win the damn game.
Then again, Scarlet Blind's post indicates Maryland does just fine on short rest. So who knows. Just win the damn game.
Found this very interesting
No. 9 Maryland at Rutgers (-1½), 7 p.m. (Big Ten Network): Time to follow my rule. Rutgers is 11-5-1 against the spread at home. Maryland has been decent on the road, winning five games and going 4-4-2 ATS. But it’s pretty telling that a team with a .500 record is favored over the team in first place. Also, efficiency margins tell us Maryland has maybe been a hair lucky — 13-5 with a plus-3.8 efficiency margin in conference play — and Rutgers has been on the unlucky side — 9-9 with a plus-2.3 efficiency margin. KenPom.com has Maryland as the 75th-luckiest team in college hoops and the luckiest in Big Ten, and Rutgers ranks 312th and 11th in Big Ten in that category. It’s finally going to catch up to the Terps. The pick: Rutgers
No. 9 Maryland at Rutgers (-1½), 7 p.m. (Big Ten Network): Time to follow my rule. Rutgers is 11-5-1 against the spread at home. Maryland has been decent on the road, winning five games and going 4-4-2 ATS. But it’s pretty telling that a team with a .500 record is favored over the team in first place. Also, efficiency margins tell us Maryland has maybe been a hair lucky — 13-5 with a plus-3.8 efficiency margin in conference play — and Rutgers has been on the unlucky side — 9-9 with a plus-2.3 efficiency margin. KenPom.com has Maryland as the 75th-luckiest team in college hoops and the luckiest in Big Ten, and Rutgers ranks 312th and 11th in Big Ten in that category. It’s finally going to catch up to the Terps. The pick: Rutgers
I understand the logic but in this particular case I don't think it works. I'd have to win a ton of money to be able to live with this loss. But if we win, who wants to lose a ton of money?
It's not a need as much as a desire, perhaps as much as your desire to call them out on something that seems to bother you. It may be a relatively small sample size, but that in itself isn't enough to say that there aren't some correlations that can be drawn. Here's a hypothetical. Let's say that, for financial reasons, the team changed their flights for away games from Teterboro to Newark, and this required them to spend an additional hour in the airport. The effect of this may be that the players spend one less hour preparing for those games, which may result in slightly less efficiency on the road. If the coaching staff is quick enough to react to the difference, the only way they find out if that was the correlation is to make the change, then do their best to see if the resultant change in performance could be reasonably attributed to that one aspect of game preparation.
Small sample sizes aren't a reason to not continue looking for ways to improve performance. Games, as with many things in life, are won at the margins, and finding the slight advantages, or removing the disadvantages, are what it's about. And that's what many fans are trying to discuss, whether it seems reasonable or not. Home-court advantage isn't insignificant, as I was recently told by a former player who I was sitting next to for our game IIRC against Illinois. He said when on the road in a loud arena, when the visiting team has the ball and cannot hear each other or the coach, they cannot run the plays as efficiently as they would if they could hear one another. Seems to make sense. This is an otherwise reasonable cause-and-effect argument, and whether it is the best explanation may be worth considering. And if it's true, it would also hold true in a small sample size just as well as a large one. But "randomness" is a circular argument that says too much and too little at the same time.
I think of it as being happy to pay for the win and getting a cash consolation prize if we lose. Not Win-Win, something else.
@RutgersRaRa, I both agree and disagree with you at the same time, and it seems really hard to explain why without basically writing a book but I'm going to do my best.
I think it's first important to clarify that my audience is certain fans on here and not coaches, etc. I'm not making a prescriptive argument or telling anyone to do anything. What I am doing is pushing back against posters who overreact to every little fluctuation and try to attach meaning to things that the team has little to no control over.
If your opinion about how we played against Penn St. would be significantly changed in the counterfactual where Myles Dread misses that three pointer (or a moving screen is called, or Akawsi Yeboah hits his shot at the end, etc) then you are doing it wrong.
If you want to change our entire defensive strategy because teams have "figured us out" where said "figuring out" primarily consists of shooting better from the perimeter and our season long defensive efficiency remains extremely good, if not elite, you are doing it wrong.
Again, there is demonstrated research showing that teams have some, but not very much, impact on how well their opponent shoots three pointers against them. (Kenpom has a series of blog posts on this, there is NBA data that I posted, etc).
Similarly, there is research across various sports (here is NFL and MLB, I'm not digging that hard here: http://www.optimumscouting.com/news/nfl-s-close-game-analytics-how-lucky-wins-or-losse , https://www.baseballprospectus.com/...seball-therapy-one-run-winners-good-or-lucky/) demonstrating that the winning (or losing) of a lot of "close games" is mostly unsustainable and that any team winning far more (or less) than there fair share of those games is not much more likely to continue doing so than other teams.
So when I see a team, such as Rutgers, that is 4-0 at home in games decided by 5 points or less, and 0-4 in such games on the road, what I see is a team whose home/road record split vastly overstates the actual difference in performance between home and road.
Note again, this is directed at FANS, those who would write off the Purdue game as a sure loss because it is a road game, and while you may write that off as a strawman there are posters here who have done that or close to it. That these posters would have a very different view if Rutgers were 15-3 at home and 3-8 road/neutral, which would basically be the expected case given the average performance level home/road, points to a failure at properly analyzing what they are seeing.
That said, we ARE worse on the road, with an efficiency margin of 9.109 vs 21.28824 at home. How significant is this? (Note I am calculating the answer AFTER writing this sentence so I don't know if this will support me or refute me, stay tuned). It is statistically significant with a p-value of approximately .01.
So the coaching staff should absolutely try to figure out why this is the case. But at the same time, they should not look at the record disparity and overstate the difference, we are not as good/bad on the home/road as the 17-1/1-10 marks indicate.
I think it's first important to clarify that my audience is certain fans on here and not coaches, etc. I'm not making a prescriptive argument or telling anyone to do anything. What I am doing is pushing back against posters who overreact to every little fluctuation and try to attach meaning to things that the team has little to no control over.
If your opinion about how we played against Penn St. would be significantly changed in the counterfactual where Myles Dread misses that three pointer (or a moving screen is called, or Akawsi Yeboah hits his shot at the end, etc) then you are doing it wrong.
If you want to change our entire defensive strategy because teams have "figured us out" where said "figuring out" primarily consists of shooting better from the perimeter and our season long defensive efficiency remains extremely good, if not elite, you are doing it wrong.
Again, there is demonstrated research showing that teams have some, but not very much, impact on how well their opponent shoots three pointers against them. (Kenpom has a series of blog posts on this, there is NBA data that I posted, etc).
Similarly, there is research across various sports (here is NFL and MLB, I'm not digging that hard here: http://www.optimumscouting.com/news/nfl-s-close-game-analytics-how-lucky-wins-or-losse , https://www.baseballprospectus.com/...seball-therapy-one-run-winners-good-or-lucky/) demonstrating that the winning (or losing) of a lot of "close games" is mostly unsustainable and that any team winning far more (or less) than there fair share of those games is not much more likely to continue doing so than other teams.
So when I see a team, such as Rutgers, that is 4-0 at home in games decided by 5 points or less, and 0-4 in such games on the road, what I see is a team whose home/road record split vastly overstates the actual difference in performance between home and road.
Note again, this is directed at FANS, those who would write off the Purdue game as a sure loss because it is a road game, and while you may write that off as a strawman there are posters here who have done that or close to it. That these posters would have a very different view if Rutgers were 15-3 at home and 3-8 road/neutral, which would basically be the expected case given the average performance level home/road, points to a failure at properly analyzing what they are seeing.
That said, we ARE worse on the road, with an efficiency margin of 9.109 vs 21.28824 at home. How significant is this? (Note I am calculating the answer AFTER writing this sentence so I don't know if this will support me or refute me, stay tuned). It is statistically significant with a p-value of approximately .01.
So the coaching staff should absolutely try to figure out why this is the case. But at the same time, they should not look at the record disparity and overstate the difference, we are not as good/bad on the home/road as the 17-1/1-10 marks indicate.
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Thanks. Didn’t know they had rest stats I’ll take a look. are they combined with their ATS numbers?
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