We all hear about home field advantage and bookies have even assigned numbers to it, but I can’t find any hard statistics to back up the assumptions. I’ve Googled but without much luck. It seems to me that it would be easy enough to calculate for most sports. Just add up the points scored by the home team, add up the points scored by the away team, find the averages and the difference between the two is the home field advantage. To fine tune it you would want to eliminate the non-conference gams and any playoffs.
Well, I think that’s a bit unfair. Some teams have a habit of winning blowouts, and losing close games (Red Sox, I’m looking your way). It’s entirely possible to score more points than you give up and still have a losing record, or have a “negative home field advantage” by that method and still win most games.
As long as the blowouts and close games were distributed randomly among home and away games, it won’t matter. Also you could score fewer total points than your opponents and still have a winning record. If the sample size is big enough it will work itself out.
This thread is somewhat related. What we discussed there was the home winning percentage - just add up the home records of all the teams in a sport and divide wins by total games. There, someone proposed a .700 home winning percentage for basketball and a .550 home winning percentage for baseball (source unknown). Ideally, this should basically be equivalent to bnorton’s total points strategy. For more on this relationship (in baseball, at least), check out the footnote about ExpWP on this page.
That was me. My source was that I read those figures somewhere some years ago. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a confirmation on the internet. (And “home field advantage” gives way too many hits in a Google search.)