Recently I read an interesting article for a business course titled "Is this Madness? How losing just a little can help a team win." The basic premise of the article is that teams that are down a little at halftime are more motivated to work harder in the second half.
Intrigued by these results, I decided to look at Boston College's games played between the '02-'03 and 08'-'09 seasons. I only counted games where BC trailed by 4 points or less at the half, which totaled 43 games. Of those 43 games, BC won 24 and lost 19. The win-loss breakdowns for each halftime deficit are as follows:
trailing by 1 point at halftime: 4-2
trailing by 2 points: 5-2
trailing by 3 points: 2-3
trailing by 4 points: 8-8
tied at halftime: 5-4
According to the report conducted in the article, teams trailing by 1 point win around 46% of the time, but using BC's data, the Eagles win 66% of the time. Granted this is an abnormally small sample size and may not reflect an accurate measure. Either way, it appears that the report holds true for the BC Basketball teams.
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