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Warhammer
10-20-2005, 09:43 AM
As most of you know, I have been involved with two FOF2k4 leagues. In the Imperial FL I am the owner of the Hartford Grizzlies, and in the IHOF I am the coach of the Telluride Outlaws. In looking back at each team's performances I have noticed a few things:

1) Telluride has more talent than Hartford compared to the rest of the league. However, they have a worse winning percentage.
2) Hartford seems to play MUCH better at home than on the road, and the opposite is true for Telluride.
3) The coaching staffs for each team are equal.
4) Hartford nearly sells out every home game, while Telluride has 1/3 of the stadium empty.
5) The game planning is a push. However, there seems to be more games with Telluride where I outplan an opponent, out gain them, more ToP, yet lose, compared to Hartford. Hartford has the Swiss Army Pull the Game Out of Its Ass Knife, especially at home.
6) In the current IHOF season, Telluride is 0-5 at home and 3-1 on the road. The one road loss was a late game collapse in a nearly sold out stadium.

Based upon these observations, I think their is a Homefield Advantage/Disadvantage at work. If you tend to sell out your games (or close to it) you will have the homefield advantage work in your favor. However, if you are struggling to put butts in the seats, your homefield is actually a disadvantage.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this?

MIJB#19
10-20-2005, 04:49 PM
Maybe the IHOF onwers are smarter than the Imperial FL owners?

As you should be able to see, my IHOF team has one of the biggest fan bases, both in figures and percentage wise, yet in my team's best days we were winning in the road, not at home.

Anyway, it's been statistically proven that home teams win 55% of the games, while there is an average 3-point difference per game. But what the correlation between big crowds and home teams winning is, I haven't checked that out yet. Should be easy to do with all the data available at the IHOF site...

cthomer5000
10-20-2005, 06:59 PM
Yeah, we tracked this once and there was a pretty statistically significant margin for home winning %. It's in a thread somewhere here on this board.

It's an interesting theory, but I would need some pretty serious evidence to considere a possible negative homefield advantage effect.

Kodos
10-21-2005, 10:35 AM
Huh. Well that's it then. From now on, the Lake Monsters only play games in Rochester!

cthomer5000
10-21-2005, 10:50 AM
FWIW, the thread were MIJB compiled the IHOF home/away records:

http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~fof/forums/showthread.php?t=34565

Warhammer
10-21-2005, 07:08 PM
It's an interesting theory, but I would need some pretty serious evidence to considere a possible negative homefield advantage effect.

Yeah, I was doing a fair bit of travelling this week, and it hit me like a ton of bricks in the car.

However, it looks like I can't find anything comparable in the IHOF database...