Home-field advantage rings true, says study

Home-field advantage is scientifically provable. Just ask Ben Motz, IU professor and scientist in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences. 

National Football League statistics show that between 1981 and 1996, the home team won 57 percent of all games.

Motz explained that this is partially due to officials making favorable calls for the home team.

“If 100,000 fans are screaming at you, you’d be a sociopath if you weren’t affected by the crowd,” he said in a press release.

In 1999, when instant replay was allowed in the NFL, the percentage of home-field wins became slightly less dominant, Motz noted.

Another factor in this phenomenon, according to the Football Freakonomics videos that Motz uses in class, might be the noise level of the crowd. The noise level is commonly up to about 30 decibels higher when the home team is playing defense than when it is on offense. This correlates with higher penalties for the visiting team’s offense.

Football statistics are one of Motz’s main tools for teaching his research methodology courses. He also discusses topics such as whether quarterbacks are the dominant influence on the NFL, why coaches are fired and how injuries can be significant.

Motz’s new course next fall will be called Prediction, Probability, and Pigskin.
Students in the course will use fantasy football leagues to learn statistics, and each will create his or her own team.

The point will be for students to use lessons from the course to make stats-based decisions in drafts and trades for their teams. The course will have six leagues, each consisting of 10 students’ teams.

Motz decided to use fantasy football in teaching when he joined a fantasy league two years ago. He saw that the people in his league were using the same kind of statistical thinking that he wanted his students to learn.

“They were thinking critically about data, using patterns they were seeing and making extrapolations about data yet to come,” Motz said in a press release. “It was pretty clear to me that it had the power to help people think empirically about data.”

Motz said people do not have to be football fans to learn through this teaching technique.

“I’ll teach them everything they want to know about fantasy football, and it’ll help them become more empirical thinkers,” Motz said.

Motz believes in original ways of teaching that make the class interesting.

“I think that it’s the instructor’s responsibility to motivate students to find interest in the course material,” Motz said. “Success, both for the teacher and for the student, is found when the learning process becomes enjoyable and self-reinforcing.”