Home/Away Records in Football

So, as you know, I have been skeptical that home field is as important in college football as it is in college basketball.  Phil Steele recently published the home and away records for the last 10 years in the FBS and they do reveal some interesting results.  First, I'll look at a couple observations, and then we will look at the MAC.

First, in general I was right, even if it was less than I thought.  The home team wins just under 64% of the games.  Now, that is less than in basketball, if only by a little.  However, the presence of FCS games means that teams in FBS start with a 52% winning percentage and a significant number of the home games in the non-conference schedule are foregone conclusions.  Both are true in basketball, but make up less of the overall total and have less impact.

In the MAC, which is usually on the business end of those games in the early season, the winning percentage for the home team is only 55%.  Let's look at the rankings.

So, there are two clearly dominant home teams in our conference....NIU and UT.  NIU is the 23rd rank team in FBS for their winning record, and UT is 43rd.  Then, you have OU, WMU, BG and CMU more or less even as you move down.  In total, 7 of the 12 teams in the conference have winning records at home.

Now, let's look at the road records.

Here, we see the home/road picture more plainly.  Only two teams have winning records on the road, and the Falcons have the best in the MAC and 28th in the country at 51%.  NIU is very close, and you can see from there how it plays out.  EMU averages one road win a year and Buffalo isn't much above that.

Now, there is one issue outstanding here.  When you look at the Steele rankings, you see that Boise has the best home record over that period of time.  They also had the best road record--because they were the best team.  NIU clearly spent much of the last decade dominating the MAC West, as seen by their record home and on the road.

So, rather than looking at who the best home and road teams were, you might instead want to know who had the biggest home field advantage.  You could measure this by looking how much better teams did at home than on the road.

Here, we see the MAC ranking better nationally, though again there is a tougher road schedule.  Nationally, the difference was 23.7%, so the MAC actually had less differential (slightly) than FBS as a whole--this is line with the modest differences we saw on the first two categories.

There are two types of team here.  I thought we would see the Toledo and NIU teams who are so tough to beat at home and (in the case of Toledo) just average on the road.  You also have teams like Akron and Kent which are not especially good at home but really bad on the road.

Two thirds of the MAC (8 out of 12) have differentials above 20% and around the national average, so clearly it makes a difference to be playing at home and probably more than I thought.  There's a big drop to the final four, which includes Bowling Green, which has not only the lowest differential in the MAC but also the 5th lowest in all of the FBS.

Which is the result of only decent results at home and being pretty successful on the road.  I think Falcon fans had sensed that we seemed to lose a lot at home, so here's hoping we can get our home winning percentage up in the 70% range, which is where our conference's most successful teams appear to be.