You know, I hear that playing soccer in Mexico City is a pretty good advantage. The air quality sucks, it’s high elevation, and fans throw bags of urine at the opposing team.
Azteca in Mexico City has it all. Pollution, altitude and crazed fans.
You sure? Some might say it’s the elevation, the pollution, or the elevation, but I’m inclined to believe that it’s the fans of the home team throwing bags of urine that makes that stadium such a chore to play in.
Don’t forget the bags of urine.
Each year the US plays Mexico. Each year offer to have the US game in San Diego if we do not have to play in Azteca. The Mexicans refuse. Each year we make them play in someplace like Buffalo New York. In the snow.
…With chimpanzees on their backs, which they must keep there the entire game. The chimpanzees also have wooden spoons, which are used to smack the rider/player in the testicles.
Yes, that’d work.
The Poulan/Weedeater Bag 'O Urine Bowl
…which is made from Mexican urine?
It’s not really every year. The USA plays friendlies in places they know will have a large proportion of Mexican fans because they want the money. When it’s for something important then they try to make it tough on el Tri. Most of my fellow US soccer fanatics are betting that the February 11th game will be in Columbus, Ohio. This will be the first match of the Hex which determines who gets into the 2010 World Cup. The Mexico match will be in Azteca. Sunil Gupta, the head of USSF has said that he’s offered to play them in a more accommodating place, but I think that’s just joking or sort of smack talk at best.
Dos a cero, baby!
nitpick: It’s Sunil Gulati.
Actually, I’d argue that despite the raw numbers, the MLB advantage is actually the highest, due to the high variance inherent in baseball. Consider, that if you have the best team in the majors playing the worst team in the majors, the bad team still has something like a 30% chance of pulling an upset. You’d never see numbers like that for football or basketball.
If I’m understanding those advantage numbers correctly, that means that in baseball, having the home field is about a quarter as big an advantage as having the best team in the league. That sounds huge, to me.
In Russia, the players throw bags of urine at the fans.
They’d be frozen bags of urine, then.
Hmm… so what you’re saying is if we could somehow remove the random element from baseball, the home-field advantage would be much larger (and would in fact be larger than the home-court advantage for randomness-removed-basketball).
I’m not sure how meaningful it is to say that though. ‘Variability’ or ‘randomness’ in a league’s won-loss records is a function of the rules of the game (clearly, a coin-toss is more random than a ‘who is older’ contest), but also depends on the makeup of the league. If we had a two-team basketball league with, say, the Celtics and the Lakers (pick almost any year 1970-1990 or 2007-2008), judging from history the teams would be pretty closely matched and you’d probably see close to a 50-50 split of games, which is maximum ‘randomness’. If on the other hand you had a two-team baseball league with the 2008 Red Sox and a little league team, you’d see the same team win 999 out of 1,000 times, with almost no ‘randomness’.
So the only way to get a less-random baseball league is to make the better teams better and the worse teams worse. It’s hard to imagine that would lead to a bigger home-field impact. In fact, it would lead to less of one, because it’s clear that the closer matched two teams are, the more important home-field advantage is.
So, I think the argument ends up going the other way: if two leagues had the same home-team % advantage, but one was full of clearly dominant and clearly inferior teams, while the other was generally more competitive, the relative home-team advantage is clearly bigger in the first league, where it can once in a while turn a blowout loss into a win, than in the second league, where it once in a while turns a narrow loss into a win.
Minor hijack
On the subject of thrown urine bags, I went to a big rivalry game at Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro with a small tour group. The tour leader led us to our entrance gate along a chalk-lined path around the outside of the stadium.
The entire purpose of the path? It marked the known outside boundary of how far the urine bags could be thrown from the top of the stadium.
I went looking to corroborate something but haven’t found it. I seem to recall some jocks on TV insinuating that in a certain domed stadium, the home field advantage was abused. Ventilation/air circulation being problematic, maintenance would open certain doors as part of their routine. However, the jocks said, it sure was strange for the visitors to attempt a field goal into a breeze…in a dome. Yes, they were implying that maintenance opened certain doors or vents or whatever to disadvantage the visitors. :eek:
They never said which dome it was; I was looking at the Kingdome in wikipedia and as a result, I stumbled across this:
Due to its concrete contruction and the Seahawks’ raucous fans, the Kingdome was known as one of the loudest stadiums in the NFL. Opposing teams were known to practice with rock music blaring full blast to prepare for the high decibel levels typical of Seahawk home games.
It’s gone, now, of course.
I thought the big house at Univ of Michigan would be higher. Wonder if they blew it in one year.
I don’t even see Michigan on that list. I know Michigan is first on winning percentage and number of games won
That’s an interesting link. Just off the cuff, I would have said Boise State. Those guys are camoflagued on that smurf turf when they wear their blue uniforms. It’s a wonder other teams haven’t gotten colored turf.
For flat out crowd noise, I would have mentioned LSU.
Some things have lead me to believe it might be the home of the Colts, but I don’t have much to back it up. There’s a little on youtube (likely biased) that shows what appears to be fake crowd noise going a little spastic on top of the actual fans.
Can’t do colored turf anywhere. BSU is grandfathered in.