Hail Varsity: Home Field Advantage

[Mavric]

In Vegas circles, home field advantage is, for any team, assumed to be about three points, but if that’s the average, there have to be some highs and lows. Enter the folks at PredictionMachine.com. They looked at game data since 2000, weighting more recent seasons more heavily and adjusting for pace, to come up with a point value for all 127 teams who have played a season of FBS football over that span.

So how much of an edge do the Huskers enjoy at Memorial Stadium? According to Predicition Machine, playing at Memorial Stadium is worth 1.60 points, which ranks 107th nationally and 13th in the Big Ten.

Now, before you start to protest, this requires some parsing and authors Paul Bessire and John Ewing do most of the heavy lifting for you:

Fans of teams from power conferences, like Florida State, TCU and Stanford, may be disappointed at their apparent lack of impact at home games. However, it’s not necessarily a good thing to top this list.

The best teams should be closer to the bottom of the rankings than the top because they should dominate more consistently and not be subject to the large swings in performance from home to away like what is seen in other teams.

While traditionally elite FBS teams should not fare well in this exercise, the same can be said about teams that are traditionally really bad.

Link

 

[huKSer]

So Pelini had just as many road blow outs as home blow outs?

 

[Redux]

It's no secret we don't intimidate opposing teams or fans. But if I have the choice to play a team in Lincoln or their house, we are going to have a bettet shot in Lincoln. Big advantage or not, it's still an advantage.

 

[NUance]

Memorial stadium is set up to provide a kindly, genteel gameday atmosphere. Look what we did with the student section a few years ago. The students tend to be the rowdiest, drunkenest, loudest fans in the stadium. They used to be right on top of the field, in the premium seats where they'd have the most effect. But then we moved them away from those premium seats, isolating them into a narrow sliver reaching up to the top corner of the stadium. The premium seats over the field are now mostly grey hairs. People that won't due bothersome things like standing up during the game, getting rowdy and yelling.

 

[HuskerExpat]

This study is fundamentally flawed. It determines home field advantage by looking merely at a team's comparative success at home vs on the road. In the case of Nebraska this means they look at how Nebraska did at home vs on the road. The problem being that if Nebraska played a bunch of road games at weak stadiums, then our home field advantage will be understated. The far better approach is to determine how visiting teams do in Memorial Stadium vs at their home stadiums. That is especially true because I would suggest that home field advantage is more of a disadvantage for the visiting team than it is an actual advantage for the home team. Crowd noise, etc, hurts the visiting team more than it helps the home team play better. And this is the reason that their flawed analysis gets the absurd result that Flordia St has a negative home field advantage.

 

[RedDenver]

This study is fundamentally flawed. It determines home field advantage by looking merely at a team's comparative success at home vs on the road. In the case of Nebraska this means they look at how Nebraska did at home vs on the road. The problem being that if Nebraska played a bunch of road games at weak stadiums, then our home field advantage will be understated. The far better approach is to determine how visiting teams do in Memorial Stadium vs at their home stadiums. That is especially true because I would suggest that home field advantage is more of a disadvantage for the visiting team than it is an actual disadvantage for the home team. Crowd noise, etc, hurts the visiting team more than it helps the home team play better. And this is the reason that their flawed analysis gets the absurd result that Flordia St has a negative home field advantage.

Yep. Any time you start out a study with a convoluted explanation about how the numbers don't make sense, you should start over.

 

[hskrfan4life]

We just need to be loud. The Miami game last year... that was fun.

 

[Landlord]

Memorial can be a hell of an intimidating place when it wants to be. We've just sucked as a team and given our fans no reason to get to the next level.

2009 OU, 2012 Wisconsin, 2014 Miami, those games were much more than a 1 point advantage being at home.

 

[alwayshusking]

Just means there isn't much difference between how the team plays at home vs the road. Having a large discrepancy between home and road performance can mean that you are a poor road team more than having a great HFA.

 

[shyndy]

Memorial can be a hell of an intimidating place when it wants to be. We've just sucked as a team and given our fans no reason to get to the next level.

2009 OU, 2012 Wisconsin, 2014 Miami, those games were much more than a 1 point advantage being at home.

In the case of 2012 Wisconsin it was apparently a 36 point difference

 

[Thanks_Tom RR]

This study is fundamentally flawed. It determines home field advantage by looking merely at a team's comparative success at home vs on the road. In the case of Nebraska this means they look at how Nebraska did at home vs on the road. The problem being that if Nebraska played a bunch of road games at weak stadiums, then our home field advantage will be understated. The far better approach is to determine how visiting teams do in Memorial Stadium vs at their home stadiums. That is especially true because I would suggest that home field advantage is more of a disadvantage for the visiting team than it is an actual advantage for the home team. Crowd noise, etc, hurts the visiting team more than it helps the home team play better. And this is the reason that their flawed analysis gets the absurd result that Flordia St has a negative home field advantage.

Your proposal is to simply look at the home field advantage of another team but limit their away game to a single venue. That would all but guarantee skewed data.
If you are concerned about home vs away SOS, then you could make it a cofactor.

 

[HuskerExpat]

This study is fundamentally flawed. It determines home field advantage by looking merely at a team's comparative success at home vs on the road. In the case of Nebraska this means they look at how Nebraska did at home vs on the road. The problem being that if Nebraska played a bunch of road games at weak stadiums, then our home field advantage will be understated. The far better approach is to determine how visiting teams do in Memorial Stadium vs at their home stadiums. That is especially true because I would suggest that home field advantage is more of a disadvantage for the visiting team than it is an actual advantage for the home team. Crowd noise, etc, hurts the visiting team more than it helps the home team play better. And this is the reason that their flawed analysis gets the absurd result that Flordia St has a negative home field advantage.

Your proposal is to simply look at the home field advantage of another team but limit their away game to a single venue. That would all but guarantee skewed data.If you are concerned about home vs away SOS, then you could make it a cofactor.

You're absolutely right. My point was more to highlight the flaw in the analysis of the original article and I didn't put enough thought into what should have been done.