Home Advantage: Blessing And Curse

Humans are no doubt territorial. This territoriality manifests itself in our athletic endeavors also, as a well-known phenomenon called the home advantage. Simply put, home advantage means the persistence of home teams winning a majority of games. This phenomenon has been around as long as team competition has been in existence but did not receive scientific study until 1977.

Schwartz and Barsky (1977) did the first psychological study of home advantage. Given that this phenomenon indeed exists, Schwartz and Barsky intended to find why it exists. Before this study, hypotheses abounded as to the cause of home advantage (travel fatigue, lack of familiarity with the home playing area, crowd noise, etc.). Schwartz and Barsky studied the four most popular sports in North America: football, baseball, hockey and basketball. Football was studied at the professional and collegiate levels, baseball at the Major League level, hockey at the National Hockey League level, and basketball at a regional collegiate level. All four sports were studied at home and away venues; basketball was also studied at neutral venues. Strong versus weak teams was studied for baseball and hockey. Small, medium and large audience sizes were studied for baseball. This study yielded five substantial results.

First, home advantage is most pronounced in basketball and hockey, and least in football and baseball. Second, home team advantage is mostly attributable to audience support. These two findings complement each other because crowd noise is louder for the indoor venues of basketball and hockey than the outdoor venues of football and baseball. More specifically, basketball enjoys a stronger home advantage than hockey and baseball suffers a weaker home advantage than football. The reason for this could be that a basketball court is smaller than a hockey rink, allowing more cheering fans into the arena. Also, at most ballparks, nearly half of the seats are beyond first and third base. These fans away from the infield, where most of the action is, possibly diminish the effect their cheering may have. Seating at a football stadium is more uniform.

Third, Schwartz and Barsky suggest that more effective offense rather than defense is the major factor underlying home advantage. That is, high audience support leads to the home team performing better on offense, not defense. Fourth, home advantage varies by team quality. Home advantage is most evident when the home team is strong and the visiting team is weak. Finally, home advantage is as important as team quality in determining performance. Therefore, winning at home is crucial to a team’s overall success.

Two minor findings were also reported. First, home advantage was the same for college and professional football. Second, at neutral venues, college basketball teams did worse than at home venues, but better than at away venues.

Nowhere are these results more evident than at Cameron Indoor Stadium, home to the Duke University men’s basketball team. This simple arena in Durham, North Carolina boasts the best home advantage in all of NCAA Division I athletics, perhaps in all of competitive sport. Every game is sold out. In fact, students pack the arena so tight, many sit on the floor, just inches from the court. The crowd is an ocean of blue and white. Noise from the crowd is deafening. Fans become so frenzied during these games, they have come to be affectionately known as the “Cameron Crazies”. Duke fans are so fervent, they have been known to hand out sheets at the turnstiles, detailing what to chant and when. These sheets are updated for almost every game. This allows them to take advantage of an opponent who, for example, was recently arrested. A loss at Cameron is a rare occurrence for Duke. As Schwartz and Barsky stated, this home dominance is a reflection of performance: from 1984 to 1994, Duke competed in eleven straight NCAA tournament appearances, and seven Final Fours, winning titles in 1991 and 1992.

Schwartz and Barsky explored home advantage differences among sports. How does home advantage differ within a sport? Acker (1997) observed differences in home advantage within the National Football League (NFL). As Schwartz and Barsky pointed out, as a team becomes stronger, their home advantage will become more dominant. Bearing this in mind, Acker set out to find which NFL teams have a better home advantage, while controlling for team quality. Scores were taken from seven NFL seasons from 1988 to 1994. This provided consistency because 1988 to 1994 was the longest stretch of recent time in the NFL that no team moved to a different city or venue.

Acker found that the home team outscored their opponent by an average of 2.91 points, a median of three points, and a mode of three points. Thus, Acker states, three can be identified as the generic advantage posed by a home in the NFL. While controlling for team quality, Acker found that the (now defunct) Houston Oilers possessed the strongest home advantage, followed by the Cincinnati Bengals, the Denver Broncos, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Washington Redskins. The teams that exhibited the weakest home advantages were the Dallas Cowboys, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Miami Dolphins, and the Los Angeles Raiders. The Indianapolis Colts had the worst home advantage in the league. The received a Home Field Advantage (HFA) score of -0.01, meaning that they had a slight home disadvantage. Interestingly, Acker found that the American Conference enjoyed a quite larger home advantage than the National Conference. This finding is odd considering that the AFC did not win a Super Bowl from 1985 to 1997.

Acker also found that playing in a particular city might contribute to home advantage. New York is host to two different teams, the Giants and the Jets. At the time, Los Angeles was also host to two different teams, the Rams and the Raiders (both have since moved out of Los Angeles). Both of the New York teams received higher home advantage scores than either of the Los Angeles teams. This alone does not suggest that city contributes to home advantage, but Acker also found that the New York scores did not differ much from one another, and the Los Angeles scores did not differ much from one another, also. These findings, Acker suggests, may indicate that home advantage is mostly influenced by the local community and not greatly changed by erratic attributes of an individual team.

Finally, Acker found that there is some evidence that domed stadiums amplify the effects of home advantage. Domed NFL teams received a slightly higher home advantage score than open stadium teams. Acker believes that the heightened noise level of a dome is responsible for this phenomenon. Acker’s views on cities and domes affecting