The System (Cold Weather Homefield)

[BishopMVP]

This was somewhat buried in the New England-Miami thread, but I thought it might be interesting to gamblers or just those who closely follow the NFL.

Here's some interesting stats regarding warm-weather/cold weather games, such as MIA@NE. Copied from FootballOutsiders.

For the purposes of this study, the following 18 teams are considered to play their home games either in a warm or mild climate or indoors: Arizona, Atlanta, Carolina, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Miami, Minnesota, New Orleans, Oakland, St. Louis, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa Bay, and Tennessee. When any of these 18 teams must play on the road in November or later against one of the league's other 14 teams -- Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Green Bay, Kansas City, New England, the New York Giants and Jets, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington -- the home-field advantage becomes far more critical than in other games.

Says who? Says the results of the games actually played since 1998. From November 1 of that year through the games of Week 13 of the 2003 season, the warm-weather and domed-stadium teams have played 203 games (playoff games included) at northern, outdoor sites after Halloween. Their cumulative record in those 203 games is 64-138-1 straight up (a .318 winning percentage) and 76-118-9 against the spread (for .397; in the above two calculations as well as in all those that follow, ties straight up and pushes against the spread are both figured as half a win and half a loss).

But wait, it only gets more interesting. When games of this nature have been played in the late-afternoon time slot or at night, the performance of the warm-weather and indoor teams has been even worse - of the 203 games referred to above, 25 have been played in the late-afternoon time slot, not counting such games played at Denver due to the earlier local starting time there (the point being that in all other cases a significant portion of the game would be played in darkness, making the temperature colder than if the game had started earlier), and the record of the warm-weather and indoor teams in those 25 games was 7-18 straight up (.280) and 7-17-1 against the spread (.300). Another 25 of the 203 games were night games (ESPN Sunday night or ABC Monday night games, and also three playoff games the last two years), and the results of those games are similar - the warm-weather and indoor teams were 8-17 straight up (.320) and 8-15-2 against the spread (.360).

Last weeks games were
MIA @ NE (NE covered)
OAK @ PIT (PIT covered)
DAL @ PHI (Philly covered)
STL @ CLE (STL covered)

This weeks games were (using Frogman's spreads from early in the week)

JAX +7.5 @ NE Final - NE 27-13
DAL -1 @ WASH Final - DAL 27-0
SFO +2.5 @ CIN Final - CIN 41-38
MIN +2.5 @ CHI Final - CHI 13-10
DET +14 @ KC Final - KC 45-17
MIA -1.5 @ PHI Final - PHI 34-27

That is 5-1 this week and 8-2 in the last 2 weeks. This is certainly interesting, as it appears to have more than critical mass.