CFB51 College Football Fan Community
The Power Five => Big Ten => Topic started by: medinabuckeye1 on August 25, 2021, 08:07:12 PM
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The thing about HFA that a lot of people don't think about is that it isn't static. Rather, it varies by team.
Years ago we did some data mining regarding home vs away records in an effort to determine which stadiums were the toughest road environments. Our conclusions were surprising at first. The teams with the biggest gaps between their home and road records weren't the teams with the stadiums that we typically think of as the loudest but they did tend to be middling teams.
After thinking it through, this made sense to me. If you think about it, HFA is only likely to be decisive in games between relative equals. Ie, tOSU is ranked #1 and Illinois is ranked #14 in our current power rankings (https://www.cfb51.com/big-ten/b1g-power-rankings-preseason-23450/). if those two teams played this year (they don't) it is safe to assume that nobody here would need to know where the game was to be played to come up with the prediction that #1 Ohio State should obviously beat #14 Illinois (in Columbus, Champaign, or on Mars, doesn't matter).
HFA is more likely to be the determining factor in games among relative equals. Ie, if #1 tOSU played #2 UW, more posters would be likely to pick UW if the game was in Madison. Similarly, if #14 IL played #13 MSU a lot of us would want to know whether the game was in Champaign or East Lansing before making our prediction.
Thus, it makes sense that HFA is biggest for teams closest to the middle of the pack. Think of it this way:
- Assume that we were going to play a 26-game double-round-robin
- Further assume that the home team will win all games against teams up to three spots better than the visitor
Here is how that would play out:
(https://i.imgur.com/M2degnh.png)
Note that HFA is only decisive in three games each for the best and worst teams (tOSU and IL) while it is decisive in four games for the second best and second worst (UW and MSU) and five games for the third best and third worst (PSU and RU). Meanwhile, HFA is decisive in six games each for the eight teams in the middle. They each lose three games to inferior teams on the road and win three games over superior teams at home.
In the real world, of course, it isn't nearly this simple. For one thing, in the real world the gaps aren't uniform and also teams have good and bad days both at home and on the road but the above still provides a general explanation for why HFA is likely to be a bigger deal for a middling team than for a contender or a bottom feeder.
Back to HFA being not static. What I mean is that it isn't the same for #11 Purdue as it is for #4 Indiana. What is best for each team is to play the teams most equal to them at home and the teams least equal to them on the road. Assuming that our rankings are reasonably accurate then, fans of #4 Indiana should prefer:
- #3 PSU at home
- #5 Iowa at home
- #2 UW at home
- #6 M at home
- everybody else on the road.
Meanwhile, fans of #11 PU should prefer:
- #10 UNL at home
- #12 RU at home
- #9 UMD at home
- #13 MSU at home
- everybody else on the road.
Note from this that it is theoretically in BOTH teams' best interest to play the Bucket game on the road this year. If our rankings are accurate than realistically #4 IU is going to beat #11 PU regardless of whether the game is in Bloomington or West Lafayette. Both teams are theoretically better off playing that game on the road and reserving their HFA for games where it is more likely to be decisive (PSU, IA, UW, M for IU; UNL, RU, UMD, MSU for PU).
This year's B1G schedule:
(https://i.imgur.com/CjtQrGv.png)
What jumps out at you?
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I didn't think this post would generate much discussion but I thought that at least @betarhoalphadelta (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=19) was enough of a statistics/cfb nerd to jump in . . .
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What jumps out at me is it seems UW has a favorable mix of H/A here.
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First of all great analysis Medina.
On the Michigan schedule I think you have it wrong for the Ohio State game because it’s at Michigan this year.
Following up that it looks to me like Michigan does catch a break with most of their tough games against better teams being at home.
The badgers have it pretty tough like 847 just said.
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First of all great analysis Medina.
On the Michigan schedule I think you have it wrong for the Ohio State game because it’s at Michigan this year.
Following up that it looks to me like Michigan does catch a break with most of their tough games against better teams being at home.
The badgers have it pretty tough like 847 just said.
Thank you.
My chart reads the other way. Look at the column not the row, ie:
- tOSU is HOME for PSU on 10/30
- tOSU is AT IU on 10/23
- tOSU is AT M on 11/27
- etc
And the Badgers . . .
What jumps out at me is it seems UW has a favorable mix of H/A here.
Agreed, their schedule is remarkably favorable at least according to our preseason Power Rankings. They are #2 and:
- miss #1 tOSU
- get #3 PSU at home
- miss #4 IU
- get #5 IA at home
- get #6 M at home
- visit #7 MN
- get #8 NU at home
- miss #9 UMD
- get #10 UNL at home
Only one road game against a team in the top-10 in the league? Wow!
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Following up that it looks to me like Michigan does catch a break with most of their tough games against better teams being at home.
I don't know what to think of Michigan's schedule. We have them ranked #6 but they have the highest standard deviation of rankings indicating that our votes are all over the place. Here is their schedule:
- tOSU at home, 11/27
- UW away, 10/2
- PSU away, 11/13
- IU at home, 11/6
- IA miss
- n/a
- MN miss
- NU at home, 10/23
- UMD away, 11/20
- UNL away, 10/9
- PU miss
- RU at home, 9/25
- MSU away, 10/30
- IL, miss
If they perform up to their recruiting then getting tOSU at home is a big break because maybe they can win that and they should be able to beat everybody else regardless of location.
If they perform more as they have been, then I see this as a pretty rough schedule because they probably can't beat tOSU even at home then they get their next two toughest opponents (UW and PSU) on the road in two VERY loud stadiums so that almost makes 6-3 a ceiling.
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I didn't think this post would generate much discussion but I thought that at least @betarhoalphadelta (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=19) was enough of a statistics/cfb nerd to jump in . . .
I'm just waiting to see if Purdue is good enough for HFA to matter. If we're really the 11th team in the conference this year, it's gonna be a LONG season.
Brohm eventually needs to start earning those damn paychecks.
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Nice analysis Medina!
Frankly, most discussions of HFA treat it as a static constant number, that applies to them at home. I see the wisdom in how it effects “in the middle” teams more than teams at the top, or bottom. A lot of podcasters and talking heads are expecting a pronounced HFA this season, as a reaction to finally having fans in the seats, again. I assume you disagree, looking at it from a strictly statistical point of view?
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I didn't think this post would generate much discussion but I thought that at least @betarhoalphadelta (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=19) was enough of a statistics/cfb nerd to jump in . . .
Im missing the point of this discussion
is it to say HFA exists or doesnt exist
is it for a betting guide
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The CFL will provide a lot of data points, even more than usual, as they are mostly playing against their own division this year because of Covid. Many teams will be playing one another thrice during the regular season, with maybe a fourth meeting during the playoffs.
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Im missing the point of this discussion
is it to say HFA exists or doesnt exist
is it for a betting guide
HFA definitely exists. If you look at records, nearly every team has a better winning percentage at home than on the road even if you exclude OOC games where part of that is due to the bigger/better teams generally hosting. Here, for example, are Ohio State's H/A records against league opponents over 50 years from 1970-2019:
- Michigan: .660 at home, .500 away
- Illinois: .682 at home, .826 away EXCEPTION
- Wisconsin: .762 at home, .690 away
- Indiana: .958 at home, .929 away
- Minnesota: .952 at home, .947 away
- Michigan State: .722 at home, .789 away EXCEPTION
- Northwestern: .941 at home, .938 away
- Iowa: .889 at home, .781 away
- Purdue: .933 at home, .611 away
- Penn State (includes some non-league games pre-1993): .812 at home, .571 away
- Rutgers: 1.000 at home, 1.000 away
- Nebraska: 1.000 at home, .667 away
- Maryland: 1.000 at home, 1.000 away
Looking at 13 league opponents:
- Against nine of them the Buckeyes did better at home
- Against two of them the Buckeyes did the same H/A
- Against two of them the Buckeyes did better on the road
No, it isn't for a betting guide, it is for discussion of the projected impact of HFA on THIS season. So, for example, we discussed that Wisconsin's schedule appears to be quite favorable because they get nearly all of the teams where HFA might be decisive at home.
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My comparison of Ohio State's winning percentages at home and on the road vs league opponents was something I thought I should explore more so here I have ignored the three newest members (UNL, RU, UMD) because there are not enough games for the comparison to be statistically valid and ranked each of the 10 league teams that have been in the league for at least half of the last 50 years by the size of the gap between tOSU's home record against them and tOSU's road record against them:
(https://i.imgur.com/hUJyBKJ.png)
Three oddities jump out at me:
- Purdue: It just makes no sense for Ohio State to have THAT big of a HFA against the Boilermakers over the 50 years from 1970-2019. In the vast majority of those seasons the Buckeyes were vastly better than the Boilermakers so HFA should have been irrelevant. Nevertheless, there they are with, statistically, the biggest HFA against tOSU. Note also that for no apparent reason the Boilermakers have the third best home record against the Buckeyes behind only Michigan and Penn State.
- Michigan State: The negative variance is odd but the Buckeyes went 13-5 against them in Columbus and 15-4 against them in East Lansing so we are really only talking about a 1.5 game difference. Over the course of 50 years that is just some randomness (like tOSU's phenomenal 1998 and 2015 teams both losing at home to MSU).
- Illinois: The negative variance is odd and this one is more than a couple games. The Buckeyes went 15-7 against them in Columbus and 19-4 in Champaign. Most of this stems from an odd three-year stretch from 1992-1994 during which the home team went 0-3. If you flip the results of those three games then tOSU would be 17-5 against them in Columbus and 18-5 against them in Champaign. That is still a negative variance but only barely.
Other than that I think the chart is pretty much what you would expect. Penn State, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin are near the top because they are programs that, over the 50 years examined here most frequently had teams good enough for HFA vs the Buckeyes to possibly be decisive while NU, MN, and IU are at the bottom because for the vast majority of the 50 years examined here the Buckeyes would have beaten those teams no matter where the games were played.
As a double-check, here is the same chart for Purdue:
(https://i.imgur.com/OLv8Kr0.png)
Four things jump out at me:
- Ohio State: See above.
- Michigan: Same reasoning as tOSU.
- Illinois: Maybe Illinois just sucks at home in general because they are better against both tOSU and PU on the road? OTOH, the difference is not significant being 11-12 at home and 11-10 on the road.
- Wisconsin: Like Illinois, the gap is not large, 6-13 at home vs 7-13 on the road.
Seeing Illinois with a negative variance against both tOSU and PU got me curious so I did the chart for them as well:
(https://i.imgur.com/qk8Bcd5.png)
It is odd that they are better against four of the ten on the road but note that the negative variances are generally smaller than the positive variances against the other six teams so they are still substantially better overall at home than on the road. I think that the negative variances for Illinois against tOSU and Michigan are mostly a product of small sample sizes in terms of Illinois wins over the Buckeyes and Wolverines. In the 50 years looked at here the Illini played the Buckeyes and Wolverines a combined 86 times and went 16-68-2. That is not a lot of wins so if they just happened to have good seasons and/or catch tOSU/M on bad seasons in Columbus/Ann Arbor then that creates this oddity.
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Possible explanation...
Teams with apathetic fan bases have more significant HFA in "big" games that the fans show out for, compared to generic conference games where attendance and excitement is tepid?
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Possible explanation...
Teams with apathetic fan bases have more significant HFA in "big" games that the fans show out for, compared to generic conference games where attendance and excitement is tepid?
That could explain why Purdue has such a dramatic HFA bump against Ohio State and Michigan but they have almost zero HFA bump against Penn State and it really falls apart when we look at Illinois. The Illini have "negative HFA" against both Ohio State and Michigan.
Maybe Purdue and Illinois fans are both somewhat apathetic but in a different way, perhaps:
- Purdue fans are generally apathetic but show up for big games (ie, Ohio State/Michigan)
- Illinois fans are completely apathetic so when Ohio State or Michigan come to town they end up taking over the stadium?
Just a thought?
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I compiled it for all league teams. Anytime someone says HFA doesn't matter ask them why every single team did better at home in this set:
(https://i.imgur.com/INgxnPW.png)
Method:
This isn't exactly all conference games. It only includes home and road games so CG's and bowls (for example tOSU and PSU played a bowl game during the timeframe) are excluded as are neutral site games such as a game that tOSU had against Northwestern in Cleveland. The timeframe is the 50 years from 1970-2019 and includes all teams in the league for at least half of that time so PSU is included (including OOC games against them prior to their joining) but UNL, UMD, and RU are NOT included.
Minnesota and Indiana have the biggest HFA in the league which is funny because I don't think anybody thinks of either of those as particularly scary places to play. One of the major reasons that they are #1 and #2 is because the HFA in games between the two of them is off the charts:
- From 1970-2019 IU dominated 15-3 in games against Minnesota in Bloomington .833
- From 1970-2019 MN dominated 15-4 in games against Indiana in Minneapolis .789
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Ok.
Now do basketball :57:
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Ok.
Now do basketball :57:
LoL, no!
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So the data-set I used is the 11 teams that made up the Big11Ten and I looked at the HFA in each of the match-ups among those 11 teams. That works out to 55 different matchups (10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1). Here they are ranked by what I am calling "HFA" which is mathematically the difference between the winning percentage when playing that opponent at home and the winning percentage when playing that opponent on the road.
Forty-five show an advantage for the home team ranging from the ridiculous +0.623 advantage for the home team in games between Minnesota and Indiana to a barely discernable +0.004 advantage for the home team in games between Ohio State and Northwestern. The other 10 show a disadvantage for the home team ranging from a barely discernable -0.018 disadvantage in games between Northwestern and Minnesota to a substantial -0.214 disadvantage for the home team in games between Penn State and Iowa.
Here is the list:
(https://i.imgur.com/qo39Kzd.png)
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@betarhoalphadelta (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=19) , FWIW your team's HFA against Ohio State and Michigan from 1970-2019 is flat our astounding.
At home your Boilermakers are:
- 7-11 against Ohio State, .389 and
- 6-14 against Michigan, .300
- 13-25 against the two major helmets, ,342
Considering the opposition, that is REALLY good. That is three out of ten against Michigan and nearly two out of five against Ohio State.
On the road, not so much:
- 1-14 against Ohio State, .067
- 1-17 against Michigan, .056
- 2-31 against the two major helmets, .061
That isn't competitive at all and basically falls into "a broken clock is right twice a day" territory.
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I think, @medinabuckeye1 (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=1547) , that you're looking at this in a way similar to the below xkcd comic about p-values.
In any comparison like this, you're looking at large arrays of fundamentally small numbers. For any combination of two teams, you're looking at a maximum of about 25 games home, and 25 games away. Yet you have 55 combinations of teams.
Any time you do that comparison, you're going to see outliers, just based on random chance.
We as people try to analyze and assign meaning to things that are often basically random chance.
I mean, look at Minnesota vs both Indiana and Purdue. Minnesota has a "HFA" variance of 0.623 over Indiana and 0.381 over Purdue, and this is a team that spent almost the entirety of those 50 years playing in an off-campus NFL stadium. That's absurd. Now, maybe you can say that's because they were in a dome, yet Minnesota has 4 of the top 14 HFA but also has 3 of the bottom 12 HFA, so it's not that they have some magical HFA over everyone.
Purdue, likewise, is 2nd and 3rd in the "best" HFA even though Ross-Ade isn't terrifying to opponents, and is also 48th and 49th in "worst" HFA.
This is random chance...
(https://i.imgur.com/uI9C3Hu.png)
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I think, @medinabuckeye1 (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=1547) , that you're looking at this in a way similar to the below xkcd comic about p-values.
In any comparison like this, you're looking at large arrays of fundamentally small numbers. For any combination of two teams, you're looking at a maximum of about 25 games home, and 25 games away. Yet you have 55 combinations of teams.
Any time you do that comparison, you're going to see outliers, just based on random chance.
We as people try to analyze and assign meaning to things that are often basically random chance.
I mean, look at Minnesota vs both Indiana and Purdue. Minnesota has a "HFA" variance of 0.623 over Indiana and 0.381 over Purdue, and this is a team that spent almost the entirety of those 50 years playing in an off-campus NFL stadium. That's absurd. Now, maybe you can say that's because they were in a dome, yet Minnesota has 4 of the top 14 HFA but also has 3 of the bottom 12 HFA, so it's not that they have some magical HFA over everyone.
Purdue, likewise, is 2nd and 3rd in the "best" HFA even though Ross-Ade isn't terrifying to opponents, and is also 48th and 49th in "worst" HFA.
This is random chance...
Oh I definitely think you are right, in 55 different data-sets there are going to randomly be some crazy outliers. I basically consider all 10 instances of "Home Field Disadvantage" to fall into that category along with the ridiculously large HFA in the MN/IU series.
You are also right that it is a pretty small number of games that make up these differences. Consider Ohio State vs Michigan from 1970-2019:
- 12-12-1 in Ann Arbor
- 16-8-1 advantage for tOSU in Columbus
If you flipped two games each in Ann Arbor and Columbus from the home team to the road team you'd get this:
- 14-10-1 advantage for tOSU in Ann Arbor
- 14-10-1 advantage for tOSU in Columbus
What I am illustrating here is that even the seemingly large 0.160 HFA in the tOSU/M series over the 50 years really only means that the home team won four extra games over 50 years (roughly once every 12-13 years).
Even the second largest differential (PU vs MN) isn't much bigger:
- 14-7 advantage for Purdue vs Minnesota in West Lafayette
- 15-6 advantage for Minnesota vs Purdue in Minneapolis
If you flipped four games each from the home team to the road team you'd get this:
- 11-10 advantage for Minnesota vs Purdue in West Lafayette
- 11-10 advantage for Minnesota vs Purdue in Minneapolis
So here we are talking about eight games in 50 years meaning that the home team won an extra game roughly every six years.
Excluding IU/MN which I agree is a random outlier, HFA varies from slightly negative to roughly one extra win for the home team every six years or so. It is a thing. It does exist and it does matter but it also isn't the end-all-be-all.
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The bigger question... How do you explain this?
(https://i.imgur.com/AET6u5E.png)
Obviously when you look at 55 individual pairings, the numbers are too small to really show a major difference. But in this case, you're looking at typically around 200 home games and 200 road games for each team. That should smooth out the variances.
Northwestern and Illinois don't seem to have strong HFA. That makes sense. Every game for Northwestern seems to be a road game because of opposing fans who have settled in Chicago coming to games, and their own fans' apathy. I'd venture Illinois might be similar... Lots of apathy in their own fan base and it's a short drive from Chicago or Indianapolis.
But how do you explain Ohio State having such a weak HFA? Ohio State has rabid fans who fill the 'shoe every game. The only thing maybe I can think is that it's similar to our tiers in basketball, where teams in the top tiers simply have more opportunity for negative upsets? I.e. that it's really hard to go THAT much better than 0.825 at home over 5 decades, so their dominance at home is capped?
Is that why IU also has the second-highest HFA despite being a basketball school? It's hard to do worse than 0.210 away, so their suckitude is capped as well? Yet that doesn't seem to affect Northwestern, who has a similar home win percentage of 0.378 to IU's 0.370, but doesn't have the same ineptitude on the road as IU...
And then there's Minnesota. Is it possible their HFA was due to playing in an indoor NFL stadium for almost 30 of those 50 seasons? Any chance you can look at their HFA from 1970-1981 plus 2009-2019, and then compare it to their HFA from 1982-2008?
I would expect that teams with more fan engagement like OSU would have higher HFA advantage than teams like IU who suck and whose fans are rooting for Notre Dame football while they wait for basketball to start... The fans certainly believe they're the "12th man", but clearly nothing in the table above justifies that fan volume is the key driver of HFA...
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Statistics are probably confusing, perhaps, at times, on average.
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The bigger question... How do you explain this?
(https://i.imgur.com/AET6u5E.png)
Obviously when you look at 55 individual pairings, the numbers are too small to really show a major difference. But in this case, you're looking at typically around 200 home games and 200 road games for each team. That should smooth out the variances.
Northwestern and Illinois don't seem to have strong HFA. That makes sense. Every game for Northwestern seems to be a road game because of opposing fans who have settled in Chicago coming to games, and their own fans' apathy. I'd venture Illinois might be similar... Lots of apathy in their own fan base and it's a short drive from Chicago or Indianapolis.
But how do you explain Ohio State having such a weak HFA? Ohio State has rabid fans who fill the 'shoe every game. The only thing maybe I can think is that it's similar to our tiers in basketball, where teams in the top tiers simply have more opportunity for negative upsets? I.e. that it's really hard to go THAT much better than 0.825 at home over 5 decades, so their dominance at home is capped?
Is that why IU also has the second-highest HFA despite being a basketball school? It's hard to do worse than 0.210 away, so their suckitude is capped as well? Yet that doesn't seem to affect Northwestern, who has a similar home win percentage of 0.378 to IU's 0.370, but doesn't have the same ineptitude on the road as IU...
And then there's Minnesota. Is it possible their HFA was due to playing in an indoor NFL stadium for almost 30 of those 50 seasons? Any chance you can look at their HFA from 1970-1981 plus 2009-2019, and then compare it to their HFA from 1982-2008?
I would expect that teams with more fan engagement like OSU would have higher HFA advantage than teams like IU who suck and whose fans are rooting for Notre Dame football while they wait for basketball to start... The fans certainly believe they're the "12th man", but clearly nothing in the table above justifies that fan volume is the key driver of HFA...
My guesses for some of these:
Look at Ohio State first. The wiseguys in Vegas generally say that HFA is around 3-5 points. Those points always matter to gamblers because whether Ohio State beats their hapless opponent by 27 (home) or 21 (away) is a big deal if you are betting on the game and Ohio State is favored by 24. However, for the rest of us I would venture to guess that nobody really cares whether Ohio State wins by 21 or 27. Either way it is a pretty substantial win bordering on a blowout.
We are only looking here at W's vs L's not point spreads so we couldn't care less whether Ohio State wins by 27, 21 or by an XP in OT. It doesn't matter because any of those three simply entered the above chart as one W.
Thus, I think that tOSU's HFA is rather mild simply because they were so good for most of those 50 years that there were not all that many games in which the difference was likely to fall within the roughly 3-5 point range where HFA could be decisive.
Similarly, the two schools with even less HFA than tOSU (IL and NU) were so bad for most of those 50 years that there were not all that many games in which the difference was likely to fall within the roughly 3-5 point range where HFA could be decisive.
One weakness of this theory is that Indiana should fall into the same category as IL and NU. They were generally awful over the 50 years in question (worst % both at home AND on the road) yet for some reason there was a substantial difference between their home winning % of .370 and their road winning percentage of just .210.
Here is another curiosity that I really can't explain, look at Ohio State and Michigan:
At home they were almost exactly equal:
- 162-34-1 for the Buckeyes
- 158-37-2 for the Wolverines
That is only a difference of 3.5 games over 50 years which is pretty clearly statistically insignificant.
On the road the Buckeyes were relatively much better:
- 143-45-4 for the Buckeyes
- 134-57-3 for the Wolverines
That is a difference 10.5 games over 50 years or a little better than one every five years.
It gets more inexplicable the more you think about it. I've travelled to every B1G stadium and while Michigan's is huge I've often referred to it as "the quietest 100k people you will ever meet". That isn't necessarily a knock on Michigan's fans. It has more to do with architecture. Unlike similarly sized two-deck stadiums such as the Horseshoe and Penn State's stadium in which the second decks hold in noise, Michigan's stadium is a giant bowl which just doesn't focus crowd noise on the field at all. It really is remarkably quiet compared to tOSU, PSU, UW, etc.
Based on that I'd have to assume that Ohio State gets a bigger boost from their crowd than Michigan does which would mean that since tOSU's and M's home records from 1970-2019 were effectively equal I'd have to concede that Michigan must have been putting a slightly better overall team on the field at home for that timeframe which was then made up for by Ohio State's somewhat louder home environment to yield an effectively equal home record. All of that would lead one to predict that Michigan should have been substantially BETTER on the road but they weren't. Why? I can't explain that. Maybe it is just because the home records for both teams (.807 for M, .825 for tOSU) are simply bumping up against the "dominance cap" that you referred to so it just doesn't matter after that.
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I compare it to a great baseball team's closer having a ceiling on getting tons of save opportunities because his team wins games by too much (on average).
And why bad teams can still have 40-save closers because most of their wins are close.
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I compare it to a great baseball team's closer having a ceiling on getting tons of save opportunities because his team wins games by too much (on average).
And why bad teams can still have 40-save closers because most of their wins are close.
I'd be interested to see how top closer save numbers track with wins. Like, do bad teams have 40-save closers that often, or do we just not spend much if any time thinking about teams that don't have interesting closers.
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What jumps out at you?
#17 Indiana @ #18 Iowa on Saturday. I have Iowa winning because of HFA.
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I'd be interested to see how top closer save numbers track with wins. Like, do bad teams have 40-save closers that often, or do we just not spend much if any time thinking about teams that don't have interesting closers.
Well, it's baseball, so it's definitely been studied in-depth.
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Eons ago, The Bobs did an analysis based on conference games only and reported that the SEC has the smallest HFA of about 3 points, the other conferences were in the 5-6 point range, which I found interesting.
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So that just suggests the team distribution bell curve in the SEC was narrower, if I understand all the charts and graphs and gobbly-gook, right.