| Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Home Field Advantage -- 1998-2001 | About the author, Boyd Nation |
Publication Date: October 30, 2001
The Numbers Start to Take Shape
I'll apologize up front if this week's column comes in a little short; I'm typing one-handed due to a hyperextended elbow (no, I didn't get a good story out of it; don't ask), but I want to go ahead and get this data out, since there's a nice young lady in Nevada waiting to use it in her science project (no, really; the Internet is a strange and wonderful place).
Last year, I took a small data look at the subject of home field advantage. Now that I have four years' worth of data, which means that each conference has had time to do two sets of home and away games, I can extend that look a bit further; the numbers are really starting to settle down, similar to the way the park factor numbers did.
A quick rehash is that you can only really look at conference games, since everybody plays a stronger non-conference schedule at home than they do on the road, because games between teams with vastly differing strengths almost always take place at the home of the stronger team. You could also add in non-conference games between pairs of teams that alternate sites between years, but there are few enough of those that I didn't bother.
Overall, I now get the home field advantage in college to be 55.6% -- in the games I looked at, the home team won in 55.6% of the games. That matches almost exactly with the 55% that has been true historically in Major League Baseball, which is interesting since there are enough differences in the environments that I might expect it to differ some.
The Conferences
% Conference W L 0.611 Big 12 374 238 0.609 MEAC 209 134 0.596 WAC 328 222 0.588 ACC 248 174 0.578 SEC 406 297 0.571 MVC 315 237 0.569 NEC 198 150 0.564 Mountain West 97 75 0.564 America East 238 184 0.563 Pac 10 303 235 0.562 Sun Belt 285 222 0.562 Southland 292 228 0.559 WCC 267 211 0.559 C-USA 295 233 0.557 Big East 275 219 0.556 Big South 169 135 0.555 Southern 333 267 0.555 CAA 186 149 0.551 MCC 125 102 0.550 Big Ten 285 233 0.545 SWAC 320 267 0.544 TAAC 306 256 0.541 Mid-Continent 203 172 0.537 MAC 382 329 0.530 MAAC 269 239 0.529 Patriot 126 112 0.528 New York 19 17 0.522 Atlantic 10 250 229 0.502 Ivy 159 158 0.501 OVC 205 204 0.497 Big West 219 222
The records here, of course, are the records of the home team in conference games in that conference for 1998-2001. If you follow the numbers, you'll see that they form a nice normal bell curve around the average, so it's not surprising that some of the conferences fall out at the extremes. It may be nothing more than random chance that the Big West as a whole is actually under .500 at home, and we might find that to be reversed if we looked at the four years before this, or the next four years, or whatever.
On the other hand, there are differences in conferences, and it's interesting to speculate on how things like weather patterns, quite relevant in some parts of the Big 12, or umpiring, where the number of umps used by a single conference is rather small overall, or style of play, like the MAAC's predilection for low-scoring games, might affect things. None of this is provable in the sample size of the games that are actually played, but it's something to think about. The conferences presumably have data going back much further than I do for conference games, so they could actually check this if they were interested.
The Teams
I'm including the entire list in a sidebar so this page won't be extra-large to download; you can go look up any teams you're interested in there. Here, I'll just include a few that interest me. The average HFA is .112 (.556 - .444), for comparison.
HFA Team HW HL RW RL 0.415 Long Island 32 8 15 24 0.361 San Jose State 47 17 22 37 0.335 North Carolina A&T 29 20 9 26 0.329 Kansas State 25 28 8 48 0.327 Troy State 33 17 18 36 0.319 Clemson 38 9 23 24 0.306 Georgia 33 23 17 43 0.269 Nebraska 40 12 27 27 0.226 Florida State 42 4 33 15 0.148 Louisiana State 43 17 33 25 0.096 Southern California 42 17 40 25 -0.116 Central Florida 39 18 40 10 -0.154 Morehead State 15 33 21 24 -0.161 LaSalle 11 36 15 23 -0.179 Cal State Fullerton 40 19 48 8 -0.217 Brown 19 25 24 13 -0.333 Cal State Northridge 5 7 9 3
That's the top 5, the bottom 5, and a few others that struck me as quite pronounced (42-4? Wow!) or as less imposing than their reputation as "a tough place to play" would imply. It's interesting that UCF and CSUF are the only ones that I would consider top programs that have been worse at home (there are around 50 or so overall that are, I think).
| Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Home Field Advantage -- 1998-2001 | About the author, Boyd Nation |