Trend of the road is clearly in sight
From tech to travel to training to money, theories abound as to why home teams win less often
An unsettling new reality is creeping across the landscape of professional sports: Any place may be as good as home.
Ask the spectators in New Orleans, Philadelphia and Foxborough, Mass., following the first round of the NFL playoffs. Or the baseball fans in Houston and Washington during the World Series last October, where the road team won all seven games.
The home-field advantage was once so airtight a principle in sports. Data supported it. Coaches trumpeted it. Stadium pyrotechnic crews fuelled it. The credo was Las Vegas oddsmakers automatically cooked in a three-point cushion for NFL home teams and adjusted their lines from there. But enough gamblers have been burned this season to question whether playing fields are levelling.
In the NFL, a variety of factors appear to be contributing to a steady shift in the competitive balance since the 1990s, when home teams won 59.8 per cent of games, including nearly threequarters of their post-season games. For instance, in 1999, the NFL added a check on referee influence by institut
ing instant replay and coaches’ challenges. The next season, the home winning percentage dropped from 59.6 per cent to 55.6. It was 51.7 this season, the lowest mark since 1972.
Some point to how coaches have better simulated stadium environments during practices. Others credit the players’ luxury travel arrangements. Still others note the rising popularity of meditation apps, sleep coaches to help guard against jet-lag and sports psychology. A few have an even stranger culprit: The rise of virtual-technology training to let athletes act out the scenarios they might encounter.
All of that can help teams manage the most hostile work environments, like the New Orleans Superdome, where the crowd noise reached 125 decibels Sunday, comparable to a jet at takeoff.
“Loudest it’s been in any stadium this year,” Minnesota Vikings receiver Stefon Diggs said.
The Vikings won, 26-20, in overtime, sending Saints fans home, hoarse and heartbroken, for the second year in a row.
You will still never get a football coach to admit he would rather play a big game on the road, said Bill Cowher, the CBS analyst and former coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. But he knows there are certain locker rooms with the right alchemical makeup to learn to love the road’s disadvantages, as his team did in 2005, when the Steelers were 9-2 on the road and chose to wear road jerseys in the Super Bowl. With so much more money available, road teams have the luxury of bringing many of the comforts of home along with them — from massage therapists and chefs to condiments and toilet paper.
“It’s so efficient,” Geof f Schwartz, a former NFL lineman and Sirius XM commentator, said of the travel routines. Little gets overlooked, including how players combat inflammation on long flights. “Guys wear compression tights or they eat better. They’re just so much better trained and more in tune with their bodies.”
The Seattle Seahawks are this year’s favourite road warrior. After winning at Philadelphia on Sunday, the Seahawks improved to 8-1 on the road. At home at CenturyLink Field the Seahawk s were 4-4, even though the stadium is designed to harness crowd noise so effectively that, at one point this season, an opposing lineman was flagged for unnecessary roughness because he couldn’t hear the referees whistle the play dead.
To be sure, any attempts to find a surefire trend of a declining home-field advantage can be a fraught endeavour that might depend on the size of the sample being studied. For instance, home teams have won 75 per cent of divisional round games since 2010 — and 74 per cent since 1990 — so maybe hold off on betting the farm on the Seahawks, the Vikings, the Tennessee Titans or the Houston Texans. Also, studies have shown even random outcomes can be streaky.
Yale economist Tobias Moskowitz said the psychology of the referees may be the most likely factor contributing to the winnowing of the home-field advantage.
Crowds have only a modest effect on professional athletes’ performance over time, Moskowitz said. NBA free-throw shooting percentages are about the same at home and away, “down to the decimal point,” he noted. But when fans were barred from attending games in Italy’s top soccer league, Serie A, after an outbreak of violence in 2007, the home-field advantage fell by 80 per cent.
“It wasn’t that the players played any differently,” said Moskowitz, co-author of the book “Scorecasting,” which investigated various sporting clichés. But, without the pressure from 80,000 hostile fans, officials distributed fouls, yellow cards and red cards more evenly, stripping away what had been a traditional advantage for the home team.
“I don’t think there’s any conspiracy,” he added. “I think refs are professionals, they’re trying to get it right. But they’re human.”
Moskowitz notes there are caveats. The best basketball teams are tough to beat anywhere, but the top three teams in the NBA this season are a combined 49-5 at home. Three of the four teams playing at home in this weekend’s NFL divisional round enter as considerable favourites.
But, across sports, securing home-field advantage for the biggest games might not be as meaningful as it once was. The last five games of the NBA Finals last summer were won on the road. It marked the third time in four years that the league’s championship was decided without confetti falling from the rafters. The last Stanley Cup champion to clinch at home? Your 2015 Chicago Blackhawks.