Home Court Advantage - Can You Believe All You Hear?
Regardless of whether its baseball, basketball, or football season, it seems like a day doesn't go by without hearing or reading comments about this team or the other having home court advantage.
One of the problems in discussions of home court advantage is that people tend to focus only on the percentage of games won at home.
At first glance, it might seem that if Team A wins 75 percent of its home games it has a distinct home advantage.
But, what if the team wins 73 percent of its away games? The advantage doesn't seem so large now.
Sure, they won an awful lot of their home games, but they won an awful lot of their away games, too.
Now, let's consider Team B, which wins 55 percent of its games at home.
At first it appears to have a substantially lower home advantage than Team A.
But do we reach the same conclusion when we discover that Team B only won 25 percent of its away games? Unlike Team A, that was successful everywhere it played, Team B was successful at home, but not very successful away.
The point I'm making is that whether a team has a home advantage or not cannot be judged simply in terms of percentage of home wins.
It requires comparing how well a team does at home with how well it does on the road.
Thus, Team A has a home advantage of 2 percentage points (75 percent home wins minus 73 percent away wins), while Team B has a home advantage of 30 percentage points (55 percent home wins minus 25 percent away wins).
I think that it is abundantly clear that playing at home versus playing away has a much greater impact on Team B's success than on Team A's success.
When you look at home court advantage this way, it becomes clear that a lot of what is purported to be home court advantage is really just good teams; that is, teams that win a lot at home and on the road.
Remember, home advantage isn't how much you win at home.
That can very well be just an indicator of how good a team you are.
True home advantage is how much you win at home in comparison to how much you win away.
The larger the difference is, the larger the advantage that can be attributed to playing at home.
A new book, "Not in our house! A Decade of Home Court Advantage in American Sports" uses actual home and away data to show which sports and teams have a "real" home court advantage and how much.
Check it out at the Sports Lit website.
One of the problems in discussions of home court advantage is that people tend to focus only on the percentage of games won at home.
At first glance, it might seem that if Team A wins 75 percent of its home games it has a distinct home advantage.
But, what if the team wins 73 percent of its away games? The advantage doesn't seem so large now.
Sure, they won an awful lot of their home games, but they won an awful lot of their away games, too.
Now, let's consider Team B, which wins 55 percent of its games at home.
At first it appears to have a substantially lower home advantage than Team A.
But do we reach the same conclusion when we discover that Team B only won 25 percent of its away games? Unlike Team A, that was successful everywhere it played, Team B was successful at home, but not very successful away.
The point I'm making is that whether a team has a home advantage or not cannot be judged simply in terms of percentage of home wins.
It requires comparing how well a team does at home with how well it does on the road.
Thus, Team A has a home advantage of 2 percentage points (75 percent home wins minus 73 percent away wins), while Team B has a home advantage of 30 percentage points (55 percent home wins minus 25 percent away wins).
I think that it is abundantly clear that playing at home versus playing away has a much greater impact on Team B's success than on Team A's success.
When you look at home court advantage this way, it becomes clear that a lot of what is purported to be home court advantage is really just good teams; that is, teams that win a lot at home and on the road.
Remember, home advantage isn't how much you win at home.
That can very well be just an indicator of how good a team you are.
True home advantage is how much you win at home in comparison to how much you win away.
The larger the difference is, the larger the advantage that can be attributed to playing at home.
A new book, "Not in our house! A Decade of Home Court Advantage in American Sports" uses actual home and away data to show which sports and teams have a "real" home court advantage and how much.
Check it out at the Sports Lit website.
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