Pac-12 basketball midpoint: Winning on the road has gotten (much) more difficult lately.

Don’t bother searching for the root cause of Arizona’s come-from-ahead loss at Oregon State. The Hotline solved the riddle. The same answer applies to Arizona’s loss at Washington State two weeks ago and Arizona’s loss at Stanford two weeks before that.

Winning on the road is hard, folks.

At the midpoint of the Pac-12 season, road teams have a 16-40 record in conference play – a winning percentage of just 28.6.

Each game follows a different course. Perhaps poor shooting by the visitors is the cause. Or officiating that leans toward the home team. Or a singular performance akin to what we saw last week in Corvallis from OSU guard Jordan Pope.

It all adds up to the same conclusion. And in the Pac-12, winning on the road this season is substantially more difficult than in recent years.

We avoided pre-COVID data, and we skipped the 2020-21 season because of the obvious disruption caused by the pandemic.

But it’s worth noting that road teams won 42.5% of conference games (raw record: 51-69) during the 2021-22 season, a high level of success perhaps attributable to the lingering impact of COVID on attendance. (Home games carried a neutral-court vibe.)

The numbers dropped in the 2022-23 season, which was normal in every regard: Road teams were just 44-76, a winning percentage of 36.7.

If the current pace (28.6%) holds through the final five weeks of conference play, the visitors will finish this season with a 34-86 record.

And that pace could be worse. Five of the 16 road wins thus far have come by three points or less. Had a few bounces gone for the hosts instead of the visitors, the win rate for road teams would be on the low side of 25%.

We could get there by March. As the grind of the season takes hold and legs become heavy, energy from the home crowd will assume a greater role in shaping the course of events.