NCAA Basketball Tournament Tickets - Home Court Advantage in the Tourney

Which college hoops team has the best fans? The answer is never very clear. It's much easier to determine which basketball team is the best in the nation, as there are endless statistics and concrete evidence from game scores and records which can be used to try to determine the greatest team. Although polls like the AP Top 25 and Coaches Top 25 are of course subjective, the results are probably fairly close to an objective reality, if there is one, because they take into account so many numbers, data that can't easily be refuted. But when the discussion changes to the question of sports fandom, there are scarce few stats to help determine which school is the best in terms of their supporters.

In a recent Pat Forde article, some of the best hoops teams in the nation were subjected to a test, one which attempted to determine which school's fans are truly the best in basketball. Since the stats on arena capacity and attendance are a little fuzzy, the data was not as concrete as, say, points and rebounds. But it was still an interesting discussion nonetheless. Forde tried to compare the team's win-loss record to their "seat filled-seat empty" record to see where the best fans live. If you're a Hoosiers fan, you should read this article. Indiana has had a rough time these last two years. With the coaching issues they've had the NCAA restrictions and punishments and recruits leaving, the Hoosiers are in dire straights and in danger of having the worst season in perhaps the history of the program.

But you wouldn't know that by the way fans still come out to the games. Indiana's fans are probably the best when it comes to die-hard supporters, the ones who come to the games no matter how the team is doing. But since the Hoosiers will probably not make the tournament, figuring out which teams will have the best home court advantage in the Tourney becomes the next logical step to using Pat Forde's data. Because most Tournament games are played at a "neutral" site, it's hard to predict how well a school's supporters will do at going to StubHub to buy NCAA Basketball Tournament tickets, and showing up to their team's Tournament games.

More research is needed to make an effective judgment on which teams have the best home game supporters and which teams have the best neutral and road game supporters. While it's hard to accurately depict the kind of affect that crowd support has on one team or another, it's clear from a mountain of evidence that games played at a team's home venue are more likely to result in a victory for the home team. How much does the familiar settings and the positive vibes from the audience have on the team's ability to get a win? Quite a bit, in fact, but recording the exact affect in some numerical way is nearly impossible. Gathering hard data on how many fans buy NCAA Basketball Tournament tickets is easy, but figuring out which team the ticket buyers are going to support would require extensive surveys.

The data is not readily available yet. Wouldn't it be interesting to record which fans are supporting which team for each game of the Tournament this March? Securing funding for this kind of research would be difficult, but we'd be much closer to figuring out which team really does have the best fans.

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