I tend to give too much "credit" to playing at home, I think, relative to what the statistics show. I recall The Bobs looked into this and found in conference games only about a 3 point HFA in SEC games, a bit high in other conferences, but only about 4.5 or so.
I know some places are intimidating to fans, like Penn State at night, but I lean to thinking some of us view away games with more trepidation than is warranted.
I'm a big advocate of the power of HFA. One thing is that I think the big upsets usually happen on the homefield of the underdog.
Even the generally agreed 3-5 points is still a really big deal though, bigger than some people realize because that is 3-5 points as compared to playing on a neutral field so it is 6-10 points difference between playing at one team's field as compared to the other team's field.
Years ago we did some looking at this within the B1G using winning percentage rather than points. What we found might seem surprising but I think it makes sense if you think about it. We found that the biggest schools with the scariest stadiums (humongous, filled with rabid fans) actually didn't have as big of a difference between home and road records as the middle schools. Here is my theory:
HFA makes the most difference to teams closest to the middle of the conference in terms of "power ranking" or however you want to define it.
Think of it this way, if Ohio State is #1 and Rutgers is #14 then HFA is only going to matter to those two schools in at most 2-3 games per year (games against #2, #3, and maybe #4 for Ohio State and games against #13, #12, and maybe #11 for Rutgers). The teams that HFA will matter the most for are those teams closer to the middle, say the #7 and #8 teams. For them, HFA might be a deciding factor in potential games against six opponents (against #4, #5, #6, #9, #10, and #11).
Current data don't really seem to back up what I remember. Here are the 14 current B1G members along with their Home Conference Winning Percentages, Away Conference Winning Percentages, and the difference between those for the last 10 years (2008-2017):
| Team | Conf H % | Conf A % | Diff |
| Minnesota | 43.9% | 29.3% | 14.6% |
| Michigan | 58.5% | 43.9% | 14.6% |
| Indiana | 27.5% | 14.6% | 12.9% |
| PSU | 70.7% | 59.0% | 11.7% |
| Maryland | 37.5% | 27.5% | 10.0% |
| Rutgers | 40.5% | 30.8% | 9.7% |
| Purdue | 31.7% | 22.0% | 9.7% |
| Wisconsin | 78.0% | 68.3% | 9.7% |
| tOSU | 90.2% | 82.9% | 7.3% |
| Iowa | 61.0% | 56.1% | 4.9% |
| Illinois | 24.4% | 20.0% | 4.4% |
| Nebraska | 63.4% | 61.0% | 2.4% |
| MSU | 70.7% | 68.3% | 2.4% |
| Northwestern | 47.5% | 58.5% | -11.0% |
Note that not all of the conference games included in this were B1G or Big11Ten games because I included Nebraska, Maryland, and Rutgers. The records are within whatever conference the team was in at the time that the game was played.
Once in a while we'll get someone on here arguing that HFA doesn't matter at all. They'll say that the field is 100 yards long no matter where it is located. My answer is this chart. If HFA doesn't matter then why did 13 of 14 schools perform better at home over the last 10 years?
