…not playing away from home, as evidenced in bubble discussions and in the committee’s new favored metric, is a huge own goal. Do you want to know what happens to bubble teams that don’t play road games? Well, they don’t make the NCAA Tournament. 19 teams - NINETEEN - of 79 Power Five schools did not play a single road non-conference game last year. That’s a quarter of your sport’s most prominent teams that aren’t touching someone else’s home court until possibly January. ….
The WAB effect is this: you’re #45 Indiana, and this year, you want to play #132 Illinois State. Now, almost always, you would look at this as a home game. Given your status as #45, based on last year’s KenPom numbers, you’re the exact median bubble team. Now, on average, you’d have about an 89% chance of winning this game at home. That represents a potential Wins Above Bubble of +0.11, which equals the delta between the projected win percentage and the actual win number of 1.0. However, a surprise home loss would be a potential Wins Above Bubble loss of -0.89, which could have the capacity to move you down 10 spots in just one night. A win functionally has no effect and maybe moves you up one spot, if that.
Now, try this on for size: you have instead opted to play this game at Illinois State. Applying a fairly standard home-court advantage of three points (also, guessing a good number of Indiana fans would make a 3.5 hour drive), your odds of winning this game are now 73.2%. That’s a real dropoff; you go from about a 1-in-9 chance of losing to 1-in-4. But: you now have a potential WAB of +0.27. That difference of +0.16 would’ve single-handedly moved you from 47th to 44th, ahead of San Diego State, and a loss of -0.73 would have been harmful but only drops you 5-6 spots as opposed to the 10 mentioned earlier.
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