Home field advantage?
With all the regular season travels completed for the Tigers, everyone is glad that the team can stay home and play only in Death Valley. But just how important is playing at home? I decided to look into the numbers to see.
To keep things relevant, I looked at only the statistics since Tommy Bowden became coach starting in the ’99 season. Since that time his teams have gone 36-12 at home, 19-20 on the road, and 1-0 at neutral sites during the regular season. That leaves the bowls as neutral site games, in which Bowden is 3-3. Road trips are clearly a 50-50 proposition.
For simplicity, I’ll leave out neutral site games.
In percentage form, the home winning percentage is 75, with the road being 48.7. So the chances of winning by playing at home are improved by about 54%.
However, with two important league games looming, I went ahead and took only league games into consideration. Here, Bowden is 20-10 at home, and 16-16 on the road. Compare that 66.7% home winning percentage to the 50% road winning percentage, and the team is only about 33% more likely to win any given league game at home.
There is some bad news to be added to this year’s 4-0 start at home. So far under Tommy Bowden, we’ve never had an undefeated home season. And through 7 full seasons, there have been only three 1 loss seasons. However if we consider only home conference games, there is a lone season where the team did not drop a conference game at home. That year was 2003.
So how does Clemson compare to other ACC teams under their current head coaches? Read on…
Thanks to the College Football Data Warehouse, I have downloaded and sorted through the records of each team in the ACC with respect to their current coaches.
These results won’t tell you the toughest place to play, per se, but they should give an idea about which team’s performance is raised the most by playing in friendly confines.
Where additions to the ACC are concerned, league stats only represent the records the teams since they became official members. Games between UVA and VT prior to 2004 aren’t factored into the ACC records, for example.
Also note that VT and FSU had some ties which are not factored in, although I don’t think that should make much difference since they both have huge data sets due to their coaches’ relative longevity.
Home% Road% Neutral% ACC Home% ACC Road% ACC Neutral%
Boston College: 70.7 51.0 85.7 75.0 50.0 N/A
Clemson: 75.0 48.7 57.1 66.7 50.0 N/A
Duke: 22.2 5.9 N/A 15.4 8.3 N/A
Florida State: 87.3 70.0 78.9 96.5 82.7 100
Georgia Tech: 66.7 50.0 50.0 68.4 50.0 N/A
Maryland: 80.6 55.2 50.0 72.7 54.5 N/A
Miami: 86.1 82.8 60.0 60.0 70.0 N/A
North Carolina: 42.9 30.0 33.3 45.5 26.1 N/A
NC State: 65.1 46.9 85.7 51.9 42.3 N/A
UVA: 77.8 33.3 59.0 73.9 31.8 N/A
Virginia Tech: 76.3 56.1 41.2 72.7 90.0 0.0
Wake Forest: 51.4 46.7 100 36.4 40.9 N/A
What does all this mean?
In general, all these teams play better at home. The degree to which home field is an “advantage” varies significantly.
Wake Forest’s Groves Stadium, despite Clemson’s recent struggles seems to offer no benefit to the Wake players. It may even be a detriment to them in league play.
Similarly, Miami’s storied Orange Bowl doesn’t offer the team much “advantage” at all.
On the other hand, Duke plays much better at home. The odds of them winning are still quite bad, but they’re nearly 4 times as likely to win at home in general, and amost twice as likely to win a league game.
Virginia is the team you would most want to play at your place. League game or not, they’re more than twice as likely to beat you at home. The Hoos are winning more than 70% of their home games, but who thinks of Scott Stadium as a particularly tough place to play? I see it every day and while it is pleasing to the eye, nothing about it screams “I’ll show you intimidation!” My advice is to beware of the pergola!
Let’s look at things put in order with respect to total outcomes.
Increased Probability of Winning Duke: 276% UVA: 134% Clemson: 54% Maryland: 46% North Carolina: 43% NC State: 39% Boston College: 39% Virginia Tech: 36% Georgia Tech: 33% Florida State: 25% Wake Forest: 10% Miami: 4%
And now with respect to the conference games played with the current head coaches:
Increased Probability of Winning UVA: 132% Duke: 86% North Carolina: 74% Boston College: 50% Georgia Tech: 37% Clemson: 33% Maryland: 33% NC State: 23% Florida State: 17% Wake Forest: -11% Miami: -14% Virginia Tech: -19%
First, it’s probably worth noting that the conference data sets for Miami, VT, and Boston College are limited to just 2 1/2 seasons or less. Thus those numbers shouldn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Second, there are definitely some trends which suggest that current situations vary from these longer term trends. But I’m staying away from those for the time being.
Beyond that, we see that Duke and UVA still enjoy the greatest gains by playing home. Clemson drops down the list from 3rd to 6th. Perhaps regular ACC opponents have come to learn that Death Valley isn’t as intimidating as the fans make it out to be. Or maybe it is that bad, and they are just better prepared.
Of course having a great homefield advantage in these terms could also mean that your team just sucks on the road. Ideally, your team should enjoy high winning percentages both at and away from home like FSU has enjoyed for decadess.
[...] For ACC teams with their current head coaches, I compared winning percentages at home and on the road both for all games and just for league games. And under Coach Groh, the Cavs are more than twice as likely to win at home as on the road. That means that Scott Stadium is truly on of the underappreciated home fields, or Al Groh is extremely bad at motivating his tropps on the road. [...]
UVA is a freakin home field POWERHOUSE!!! And I don’t respect you even questioning the power of Death Valley. That place is loud and everyone knows it, the coaches just scare the hell out of their teams the week prior to a game there and pipe in 747′s taking off during practice. As mentioned in Mickey Plylers blog for Maryland this weekend: WE MUST PROTECT THIS HOUSE!!!!
I’m afraid, it’s fall break at Clemson and I expect the student section to be MORE than dead.