Hey, There's a really interesting extract from a recently published book in last weeks S.I. that attempts to explain home field advantage. [The book is "Scorecasting" by T.J Moskowitz & L.J Wertheim.] In summary, home teams win (and have always won) as follows: NBA: 62.7% NHL: 59% NFL: 57.6% MLB: 54.1% EPL: 63.1% and so on. They expose crowd influence, travel, scheduling, weather and the homefield as myths. It's the refs! - Not intentionally, but what psychologists call "informational conformity" where the refs (in all sports) are influenced by the crowd.... No crowd, and the advantage vanishes! They include some pretty powerful statistics to back it all up - Very cool stuff! Cheers, Ian
Freakanomics had a good podcast which involves the world cup that covers this also. Good theory on penalty kicks as well.
I find the travel 'myth' a bit tough to swallow - at least in some sports. Take the current Celtics schedule: •Tuesday night game at home against Cleveland. •Leave Wednesday afternoon for Portland - seven hour flight and three hour time change. •Play in Portland Thursday night at 10:30 PM EST. •Travel to Phoenix - 2.5 hour flight and lose an hour. •Play in Phoenix Friday night at 10:30 PM EST •Travel to LA •Play LA on Sunday Afternoon. Somehow I don't think that travel isn't having an impact on home court advantage. Travel would seem to be less of an issue for Football and baseball due to the relative stability of only traveling twice/week in baseball and no more than one per week for football. Not surprisingly, the NBA and NHL have higher home winning percentages than the NFL and MLB.
While I agree you can "prove anything with statistics", their analysis is a powerful argument against travel being an issue. Unfortunately, the article isn't online - SI chose to post another chapter on their site "The curse of the #1 pick". http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/the_bonus/01/13/sportscasting.excerpt/index.html Cheers, Ian
Just read Scorecasting. They actually address the point I made as being more about scheduling rather than traveling. Note sure I would have split that hair, but in order to make their point they really didn't have an option. In the end, I do agree, they make pretty compelling arguments. Some of the other topics covered in the book were pretty interesting as well.
