The importance of proximity in the NCAA tourney.

I told Winfield yesterday that I was going to look at how important it was in these first two rounds to be close to home. He said it'd probably be pretty balanced as we've seen some teams lose close to home and some teams win really far away from home. Winfield was right. In the first two rounds, the average winning university was only 56 miles closer to the host site than the losing university. The furthest team from home was St. Mary's (CA) who was playing 3,086 miles from Maraga, California in Providence, RI. The closest team to home was Syracuse playing 150 miles from the Carrier Dome in Canada Buffalo, New York. Both of those teams interestingly won.

Excluding the play-in game, there were 48 games played. 29 of those games were won by the team whose home was closer to the host site (60.4% of the time). The biggest upset in terms of proximity to the host site was actually St. Mary's over Villanova. Nova is located 2,815 miles closer to Providence, Rhode Island than St. Mary's.

The ACC is currently 5-5 in the tournament. The average team has played about 1,074 miles from their campus. The average ACC team has played 1,104 miles from their campus in 10 games thus far. The average ACC opponent has played 1,302 miles from their campus. This is a bad stat, Winfield.

Let me know your thoughts.