Big Ten Home Field Advantages

...have the Big Ten schedule the OSU- IU game in Bloomington more often.

A ten year comparison of Big Ten stats should have eleven years. Pretty soon we'll need to include twelve years in every ten year study.

Your system punishes teams that win on the road (good teams) and rewards teams that lose on the road (bad teams). If Indiana has a 1 win season, do you think that is going to come at home or on the road?

I'm interested to know the strength of schedule related to each home game. I could see there being some inbalances based on who is rotated off certain schedules in certain years.

And to that same effect, how many times did each team win as an underdog at home? That could be tougher to find. The road compared to home winning percentage does a good job of somewhat explaining what I'm looking for, but it's not a perfect metric either.

the effect of cupcakes, paid to come get slaughtered at home, will make it seem that teams like Michigan have a better home field advantage.  What you should have done is take the win percentage of all teams at home in Big 10 conference games, and compare that to their win percentage in B10 conference games on the road.  The difference will more or less give you the home field advantage each team enjoys.  You current method is definitely flawed though as it A) rewards you for losing on the road/hurts you for winning on the road and B) is effected by the number of home vs. away games a team has each year, which varies across the league.

I think the OPs topic is interesting.  I'm sure the Mathlete could lend more advice in this area, but there's two ideas for a statistical analysis that the OPs diary made me think of:

1. A regression analysis where the dependent variable is points scored and one of the variables of interest is whether or not the game was home or away.  The coefficient on the home/away variable would show the difference in points scored whether or not the game was home or away. 

Essentially, using this we would be able to say playing a home game is associated with scoring x more (assumed it would be more) points than an away game.

2. A regression analysis where the dependent variable is whether or not a team won the game.  Again, an independent variable or interest would be whether or not it was a home or away game.

Using this setup, we would be able to say, playing a home game is associated with an x percentage point increase (assumed it would be an increase) in the probability of winning.  

With both, we could also find the effect of say, number of starting seniors, etc, on points scored per game, or probability of winning.

Additionally, there'd have to be a lot of other variables that are included to control for stuff, like opposing teams rank, etc.  If you guys think its interesting, I could definitely start working on it.

...when I came across this post.  (The players have to think one game at a time, not me.)  And I was hoping that RR could survive '10 to get to '11, when UM should be really competitive BLAH BLAH.  And smiling that OSU will be coming to the Big House, et cetera.

Then I thought, gulp, what if Michigan's first game against Nebraska is in Lincoln?  Not saying it wouldn't be a W.  And maybe expansion will set up an even more advantageous schedule, if either (at) Wisconsin or (at) Iowa fall off temporarily.  But there is uncertainty.

But, f-it.  Like RR says, "They'll tell us what it is and then we'll go."

Still, I'd rather welcome Nebraska to the Big Ten and the Big House simultaneously.

I don't want to see Michigan play Nebraska in a conference game in 2011.  Hopefully, this sets up an inaugural Big Ten Championship game matching undefeated Michigan against undefeated Nebraska with a MNC berth on the line.

That would be a great way to start the expansion era of the Big Ten. 

The study is set up very well and is very interesting.  The only caveat I would add is that there is a ceiling problem--maybe the Horseshoe is the single hardest place to play in the world, but Ohio State does so well in their away games that there's really not much possibility to improve at home.  Ditto for Michigan if you don't count the last couple of years--the better you are, the harder it is to improve.

I would expect that the better a team is, a bigger home field advantage would be necessary to keep the same EIWH.  It would be hard to really show that without a very large study, so there's not much to do in order to address it, but I think it's still important to note the limitation.

always have an advantage when it comes to weather, seeing as they're used to playing in such frigid conditions, those SEC babies always falter when the come up here, and also our time, effort, and money into large stadiums (cough* Bighouse... Happy Valley.... Horshoe)

also keeps the fan base large

to me this should be a measure of how difficult it is to play at a particular away stadium for the road team, not how good each team is at home. To put this in mathmatical terms: how much more does team A lose at stadium B versus stadiums C-J compared to their average away record. what you did was look at how much more Team A wins at home, a slightly different measure

i think that interpretation will correlate more with our feelings of how it is difficult to go into the shoe and win or travel all the way to iowa.

somewhere in that equation you have to control for the relative strengths of each team (maybe divide by the teams' overall winning %) so that it doesnt just put the best teams at the top of the list, but i think there is a way to do it