Usually the advantage to playing at home, other than a nebulous psychological boost, is the effect of the home fans making noise so the visiting team can’t hear their own play-calling, or trying to distract kickers into missing. But the SB will be different, because the visitors will not be primarily home team fans, they’ll be from all over.
Any other home field advantages that still apply? The Rams won’t have to travel, that’s something I suppose. They’ll be comfier in their own familiar locker room. I don’t think here’s any environmental advantage, the way there would be if, say, Green Bay played the SB at home in bad winter weather against a warm-weather team (I guess if it’s particularly hot that day, it could affect the Bengals more negatively than the Rams).
Anything else I’m not thinking of? Not wondering for betting reasons, just curious. Last year was the first year ever a team played the Super Bowl at home, and the Bucs did win; did they get a home field advantage boost would you say?
If there are any quirks of the field, the Rams would know it, for whatever help it is.
To give one example, way back in the day, Texas Stadium had a slight swelling of the field, well known as the “hump,” because of water absorbance or something. So the Cowboys were accustomed to playing on a field that was high in the middle and low on the edges while visiting teams were accustomed to a purely flat surface.
But I doubt SoFi would have any major flaws like that that would make a difference.
The players from LA don’t have to travel and stay in a hotel room, they can chill from home. That’s got to be an advantage. And there will still be a lot of Rams fans in the stadium and the tailgating in the lot will be humungous. Pretty sure the season ticket holders of both teams have the chance to purchase tickets in any super bowl, being in LA I’d say most of them will attend or sell there tickets to other locals, not as many from Cincinnati will sell to other Cincinnati fans as they will post them for sell to the highest bidder.
The Rams are technically the ‘away’ team, because home and visiting teams alternate between the AFC and NFC every year.
The Bengals have a 5 hour flight across 2,000+ miles and three time zones. Jet lag is real, but in this case bad weather in Cincinnati means they are in LA on the 8th and take over UCLA’s Drake Stadium for practice.
ETA: On the other hand, the current win rate for NFL teams playing the Super Bowl in their home stadium is… 100%.
That’s ringing a bell, but with Lambeau Field-- I seem to remember watching a playoff game at Lambeau back to the Favre days, where the announcers were talking about Lambeau field having something like that-- and being familiar with it supposedly conferred an advantage to the Packers. I think they even called it ‘the hump’ as well. Is that possible it happened at Lambeau too, or am I imagining things (a distinct possibility)?
Most outdoor football fields from high school through the pros had that, back before higher tech water drainage technology and artificial turf was widespread. Certainly not unique to any particular field back then.
I don’t think travel or jet lag is going to be of concern since were only talking a few hours and players will probably be in town a week ahead of time to experience the whole “Superbowl Week” of interviews and events.
Homefield crowd advantage won’t mean much since not a lot of the real fans can afford to go to the game. The average ticket price this year is $10,000 per seat. It’s going to be a whole lot of rich people and celebs going to be seen at the place to be.
Consider also that the Rams have only been playing at So-Fi since 2020, and they’re relatively new to L.A. in general. ETA: well, judging by the below comment, there’s probably a lot of Rams fans who held on from last century.
Also, L.A. has a whole 'nother team to split the city’s fanbase.
A week in which the Bengals will have no choice but to consume exotic LA fare such as Baja-style fish tacos and donuts from a pink box, rather than that weird-ass cinnamon-chili-on-spaghetti they’re accustomed to eating. Think of the havoc this could play with the team’s digestive health!
They will; it looks like the Bengals will be using the Chargers’ locker room – SoFi apparently has two “home” locker rooms (one for each of the two teams that call the stadium home), and two “visitors” locker rooms.
I think to be fair, whatever team plays in the stadium that will be hosting the Super Bowl should be ineligible to compete. They forfeit the conference championship if they make it that far. If multiple teams share a stadium, they are all ineligible. That’s the only way to prevent this problem.
IIRC, Nate Silver once crunched the numbers for the NCAA, and found that in tournaments, the teams with shorter travel distances had a clear advantage over those with longer. Part of that might be that they were able to bring more of their fans with it, but I think he concluded that it was mostly due to the stress of travel.
If this were actually a serious concern, I’d just suggest having backup locations. It shouldn’t be too hard to schedule a slot by the time they know who will play.
