Study · College basketball · 2024-25 season · 949 games
Home court
is underrated.
College basketball home teams were priced to win 62.2% of these games. They won 66.1%: 627 of 949.
949 games with closing prices from 3 or more books, 4 November 2024 to 3 April 2025 · Published 30 October 2026 ·
Free to quote under CC BY 4.0 ·
Download the data (CSV)
NCAAB2024-25
241 of 255
Big favourites won
Home court
month by month.
Home teams beat their price in every full month of the season. Home favourites won 77.1% of 690 games against a 72.6% price; home underdogs won 36.7% against 34.3%.
| Month | Games | Home priced | Home won | Home wins |
|---|
| November 2024 | 165 | 67.2% | 69.1% | 114 |
| December 2024 | 143 | 65.2% | 67.1% | 96 |
| January 2025 | 258 | 58.2% | 60.9% | 157 |
| February 2025 | 245 | 60.4% | 67.8% | 166 |
| March 2025 | 136 | 63.5% | 68.4% | 93 |
| April 2025 | 2 | 54.4% | 50.0% | 1 |
| All | 949 | 62.2% | 66.1% | 627 |
On average the home team won by 5.08 points.
"Home" is the home team named by the books. Postseason games are mostly at neutral sites, so they are a tiny part of this table.
Favourites
by price.
Big favourites won much more often than their odds said. The 60-70% band was the one weak spot.
| Favourite's price | Games | Priced to win | Won | Lost |
|---|
| 50-60% | 240 | 55.2% | 58.3% | 100 |
| 60-70% | 235 | 64.9% | 61.3% | 91 |
| 70-80% | 219 | 74.9% | 78.1% | 48 |
| 80-90% | 174 | 84.9% | 93.1% | 12 |
| 90% and up | 81 | 91.7% | 97.5% | 2 |
| All favourites | 949 | 70.7% | 73.3% | 253 |
Teams priced at 80% or more were expected to win about 222 of 255 games. They won 241. Only 2 teams priced at 90% or more lost: South Carolina Gamecocks (home) to North Florida Ospreys (71-74) on opening night, and South Alabama Jaguars (home) to UL Monroe Warhawks (58-62).
Is it
real?
Yes, for home court in this season. The home gap is +3.9 points, and when we resample the games 4,000 times it lands between 1.3 and 6.5 points, 95 times in 100: above zero. Favourites as a whole: +2.6 points (range -0.1 to 5.3), right on the edge.
Two plain warnings. This is one season, and it is a sample of 949 games, not all of the roughly 6,000 Division I games played. The tournament is only 22 games here, too few to say anything about March.
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How we
measured.
The method
We took the closing moneyline for 949 men's college basketball games from 4 November 2024 to 3 April 2025 that had prices from at least three sportsbooks (about 6 on average, collected about 30 minutes before tip-off). Each book's two prices were turned into chances, then scaled so the two teams add up to 100%, which removes the book's cut (on average 5.79%). We averaged the books for each game and matched it to the final score.
On the Brier score (the average squared error of a chance; a coin flip scores 0.250), the closing prices scored 0.1753, better than the 0.1916 they expected of themselves, because home teams and big favourites won more often than priced.
The data file
college-basketball-home-court-2024-25.csv has one row per game. Columns: date, stage, home, away, home_chance (margin-free closing chance for the home team), books, home_score, away_score, home_won.
Free to use, share and adapt under CC BY 4.0. Please credit “Bet Better (betbetter.world)” and link to this page.
Cite this study
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