This stat says Philadelphia and Dallas have the worst home-field advantage in the NFL
Home-field advantage is the most misunderstood asset in sports. We use it like it's the end-all, be-all of game prognostication. Ask the Golden State Warriors how well that worked out in the NBA Finals. In the end the advantage brought on by playing at home is minimal. Teams traditionally win 57% of home games in the NFL (it's lower this year) and there's only speculation as to why teams are better in their friendly confines (lack of travel, fan support, referee's slight bias toward home team). But all this got us thinking, which NFL team has the best home-field advantage in the sport?
To listen to television, Seattle would be the winner, with their tin-roofed stadium that's served as the greatest enhancer since the WonderBra. Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium has been hailed for years as the loudest outdoor stadium and every indoor stadium or dome is thought to be a magical panacea for even the worst teams. Do the numbers agree? Not really.
Here's a list of every team's home and away record over the past 14 seasons. (We chose 2002 as a starting point because it was the first year of 32 teams in equal divisions.) If a team had a stadium built between then and 2010, we've noted it. You can ignore the Vikings and 49ers - their records were almost entirely accrued in different stadiums. We left them in because we are completists (and didn't want people tweeting that we only listed 30 teams).
It's a lot to digest but here were five things that jumped out in our rankings of the worst- and best-five home-field advantages in football.
a. The Ravens are remarkable. They have the biggest discrepancy between home and away games, posting a tremendous 82-30 record in Baltimore versus a (very) sub-.500 mark on the road. Compare: They're second in home winning percentage and 19th in road winning percentage. As we'll see later, the numbers on this chart can often be misleading but not with Baltimore. This is a team that has eight fewer home wins than the Patriots and 31 fewer road wins. That's a home-field advantage.
b. The Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys are the only teams who've played better on the road than at home during the current lives of their stadiums. For the former, it has nothing to do with Philadelphia's home-field performance, which is perfectly adequate. Instead, the Eagles are averaging the second-most road wins per season since they got to the Linc. It's not a matter of being bad at home, it's a matter of being great on the road. They're over .500 in both, after all. So, no, the Eagles don't have a bad home-field advantage. They merely disrespect the home-field advantages of other teams. As for the Cowboys, they're equally mediocre since Jerry World opened, something that can't be explained away.
c. As mentioned though, the numbers aren't everything. The inexactitude is best exemplified by the aforementioned Patriots, who are an insane 95-17 at home, but also have more road wins (76) than 27 NFL teams have home wins. That leaves New England in 12th place in home-field difference, behind the Jaguars, who have fewer total wins in the division era than the Patriots just do at home. Does that means the Patriots don't have a great home field advantage? No. It just means they're so good on the road that even the most unbelievable home record won't boost their percentages. Look at the numbers on a team-by-team basis, not as a comparison.
d. The next team in percent change (among those who've played in the same stadium since 2002) is the Seahawks, who surprisingly have four fewer home wins at their boombox of a stadium than the Ravens do at their conventionally designed home field. Seattle has four more wins on the road however, meaning the Ravens are 33.0% better at home and the Seahawks are 25.9%, a resounding "win" for Baltimore.
e. The biggest stunner to me: The Saints are just 9% better at the Superdome than they are on the road (and that's without counting the 1-7 "home" record New Orleans had in 2005 when damages from Hurricane Katrina forced the team to play at LSU's Tiger Stadium). You would think a good team like New Orleans would be able to dominate inside a dome with 76,000 passionate fans. The Saints still have a fine record but not as fine as ... Cincinnati?
That leads us to our objectively arbitrary rankings of the best advantages in the league. Philadelphia is nowhere to be found even though they're No. 32 on our list above. (We've discussed why.) The bottom five we've chosen are a mix of good teams and bad ones. A better team should theoretically punished more for not being great at home but a bad team's ineffectiveness in front of its own fans can't be discounted either.
NFL home-field advantage, ranked
32. Dallas Cowboys
31. Carolina Panthers
30. Oakland Raiders
29. New Orleans Saints
28. Cleveland Browns
As for the top, it's a complicated game to play. Does Detroit have a better home-field advantage because they're less bad at home than they are on the road? Or do good teams that are fine on the road and excellent at home have more power? Given that home-field means nothing for Detroit other than an occasional playoff berth or a few positions of draft jockeying, we have to go with the latter argument. After all, when you play in Detroit you still have a 57% of winning. When you play in New England, I don't know, hope the game's against UConn?
5. Pittsburgh Steelers
4. Green Bay Packers
3. Seattle Seahawks
2. New England Patriots
1. Baltimore Ravens