Mr. Dan Flynn contacted me regarding his thoughts on replicating “Home Field Advantage” and wanted an honest opinion on some ideas he was kicking around. After a little back and forth, Dan decided to table it for now and asked me to hold off presenting his ideas at this time. During our discussion, Dan pointed out the “Home” teams win at higher rate than road teams on a very consistent basis.  He used 2005 card set as an example were the home teams won at .570 clip (that is very close to the historical average).

My problem with external factors such as home field advantage, weather conditions, crowd noise, injuries, etc. have already been “baked” into the cards. There are so many variables to consider, does each team actually play well at home? What is each team’s “strength of schedule”? Personally if I ever considered implementing any type of “home field” advantage, I would keep it very subtle and use a few of my friend Ray Dunlap’s innovations. For instance, on third and fourth downs, if the play resulted in exact yardage for a first down require a measurement. If my team had a real good home record, I would say on dice rolls of 1 through 5 the visitors were short by one-yard. I would implement his “Bonus A” innovation, if a B receiver catches three in a row without an incompletion, he is an “A” receiver on his next target. C” receiver only requires two in a row before earning his bonus “A” on next target. These type of innovations don’t tinker with the cards but could have a huge impact on the outcome of the game. On the flip-side, Dave Urban is someone who I have great respect for and I know that he adjust the home team split offensive index by one.

Listen, Dan certainly is not the first person to ever contact me regarding “home field advantage” so I would love to open this topic up for discussion and hear other folks thoughts, methods, and any hopefully some statistical data.