The Toughest Place to Win in Sports
The road winning percentage in major men’s college basketball is .340 — meaning the road team wins roughly one out of every three games.
Somewhere on Earth there may be a sport in which this figure is lower. But it isn’t the NBA, NHL, American or Australian football, English or Argentine soccer, Major League Baseball, Japanese baseball, Dominican winter baseball, or any of two dozen other sports leagues.
There is nothing tougher in team sports than what 42 schools in NCAA’s Division I will try, mostly in vain, to do tonight: Put a dozen skinny kids into an opponent’s gym and beat them at basketball. And this season so far, nobody is immune from the danger. In each of the past five weeks, a top-10 team in the Associated Press poll has lost on the road to an unranked one.
wsj.com
3/4/09
