College Football Home Field Advantage

Posted by Jimmy Boyd - Google+

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Which college football teams really have the best home field advantage?  Most sources try to generalize home field advantage into a simple number that can be applied to every game.  The fact of the matter is, there is no magic number that applies to every team for ever game.  Each team has built their own home field profile, and that is what I have tried to capture.  I will go into more detail about how I came up with these numbers below, but the table that follows shows how much better each team has performed historically (represented by points) at home compared to on the road.  The data was taken for each team for games between 1989 and 2011 in conference play only to help remove outliers caused by playing inferior non-conference opponents.  Keep in mind that some of the best teams in the nation over the past few decades show up at the bottom of this list.  This doesn’t mean they don’t have any home field advantage, but rather that they play just as well on the road as they do at home, so their true advantage is simply not as significant.

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So, where do these numbers come from?  Like I said, I pulled game data for each team for all of their conference games from 1989 to 2011.  I took then took the difference of each team’s home margin of victory and road margin of victory and divided that number by two to get each team’s advantage at home over a neutral field.

There are a few things to keep in mind when you look at this data.  First, obviously there is a lot of turnover for college football teams, so there is going to be some fluctuation from year to year, however, over this length of time there are certainly some patterns that emerge.  You will also notice that the teams at the top of this list are mostly bad road teams, which influences how much “better” their numbers look at home.

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About the Author: Jimmy Boyd is known for his consistency. He's a proven winner in college and pro football, college and pro basketball and pro baseball. He finished as the No. 1 ranked MLB handicapper in 2007 by earning $1,000/game bettors $50,050. He also finished as the No. 1 ranked basketball handicapper in the 2008-09 season, profiting $1,000/game bettors 38,530. His basketball plays have banked $1,000/game bettors nearly $80,000 the last five years. Check out Jimmy's premium picks for tonight!

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