On Sunday at Penn State’s Bryce Jordan Center, Maryland men’s basketball put the finishing touches on an awfully unique Big Ten season: they went 10-0 at home and 1-9 on the road. While home-court advantage is certainly a key part of college basketball, it’s normally not this extreme. 

Let’s take a closer look at some numbers to put this season in context and try to understand how it happened.   

Maryland has previously been this good at home…but not this bad on the road 

The 2022-23 season marked the fifth time in eight B1G seasons with crowds that Maryland lost either one or zero games in College Park. In fact, 2014-15, much like this season, saw both an unbeaten home record and a court storming after a top-five win.  

Of course, the problem is every other season with a strong home performance didn’t include a road performance this horrendous.  

Maryland’s four previous seasons with one or zero home losses saw them go .500 on the road with a 19-19 record, a sharp decline from this year’s 1-9 record.  

Winning road games in the Big Ten this year was tricky…but not impossible  

This year in the Big Ten, the home team went 91-48, good for a winning percentage of 65.5 percent. As such, that meant that the road team managed to win 34.5 percent of its conference games. These numbers, as you can guess, show that Maryland was an outlier for winning percentage at home and on the road. 

Everyone besides Maryland lost at least twice at home this year, with five different schools putting together an 8-2 record. Meanwhile, the only other schools that failed to get multiple road wins were Minnesota and Ohio State.  

The easiest way to summarize Maryland’s performance between home and road games is by seeing the difference between their two winning percentages compared to the rest of the conference. 

Maryland’s two winning percentages are separated by 90 percentage points, while no one else clears a difference of 50 percentage points. 12 of the 14 teams had a higher winning percentage at home this year, but no one came close to Maryland when it came to a home-court advantage. 

Kevin Willard’s teams don’t normally do this 

We already examined how Maryland did since the conference switch in 2014-15, so let’s use the same time frame to see how Kevin Willard did in the Big East at Seton Hall.   

In Willard’s final seven non-pandemic regular seasons at SHU, his Pirates won exactly two-thirds of their games at home, while seeing that figure fall to 45.3 percent outside of New Jersey.  

Willard’s 2018-19 team came the closest to this year’s Maryland squad, going 7-2 at home and 2-7 on the road to give them a .500 record in Big East play. That season included home wins against #16 Marquette and #23 Villanova, but also a road defeat against a DePaul team that finished tied for last in the conference standings.  

Another thing that stands out about Willard’s home/road track record is that his best Seton Hall team was better on the road than at home. The 2019-20 Pirates were projected to be a #3 seed in the NCAA tournament and that was certainly thanks to their ability to pick up some huge road wins like beating #10 Villanova. 

Nothing about the above table strongly indicates that Willard’s SHU teams were overly dependent on home-court advantage, further adding to the oddity of his first season in College Park.  

Three-point shooting struggles emerged on the road 

So we’ve established multiple ways that Maryland’s home/road disparity in conference play was remarkable. Now, let’s explore some figures from Maryland’s starting five to better understand how exactly they went 10-0 at home and 1-9 on the road. 

For Jahmir Young, the biggest disparity came from something not entirely in his control: free throw attempts.  

At home, Young attempted 6.7 free throws per game while making 5.8 per game. Meanwhile, Young’s conference games outside of Maryland saw him get to the line only 2.8 times per game, a dip of almost four attempts per game. Young didn’t have a major decline for field goal percentage or three-point percentage, but his disparity for getting to the line is still notable. 

While Young was a pretty consistent shooter at home and on the road, the same was not true for any of Donald Carey, Hakim Hart and Donta Scott.  

All three players saw a dip of over 12 percentage points between their three-point percentage on the road and at home. Carey had the most notable difference, making 45.2 percent of his threes in College Park while seeing that figure drop to 28.6 percent on the road.     

Hart was also notably more productive with his inside shots at Xfinity Center compared to opposing arenas. He made 61.2 percent of his twos at home, while that figure shrunk to 40.9 percent as a visitor. Hart’s road struggles inside and outside combined for a field goal percentage above 50 percent at home, but below 35 percent on the road. 

Quite curiously, the trends we’ve covered so far simply didn’t apply for Julian Reese.  

Reese’s field goal percentage was 10 percent higher on the road and even more surprisingly, he made his free throws at a higher rate in front of hostile crowds. Reese admittedly had more rebounds and blocks per game at home, but it still stands out that he was a more efficient scorer for both field goals and free throws on the road.  

So in summary, a noticeable drop in three-point percentage for three of Maryland’s five starters goes a long way towards explaining their home/road disparity. However, make sure you give Reese his props for being unphased by trips to places like Nebraska or Iowa. 

Rose Katz
Rose Katz

BSL Analyst

Rose Katz is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, where she worked for The Diamondback as the online managing editor and a sports blogger. As a student, she spent almost all of her time on campus in The Diamondback’s newsroom or at Xfinity Center, Ludwig Field and Maryland Stadium. Rose gained intern experience with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN).

X