'Ultimately, the answer was that playing at home is an advantage, but it's clearly not the advantage that it will be this year. 'How much of an element is travel? What effect does the crowd have on referees? 'Last year was extremely difficult because it was an interesting test in a lab for what actually contributes to home field,' Croucher explained. Good luck.įor more up-to-date news on all things college football, click here to register for alerts on the FOX Sports app! I'm cracking up just thinking about oddsmakers scratching their heads trying to calculate how much home field is worth at Miami's Hard Rock Stadium at 20% capacity. This NFL season, bookmakers are battling something they've never had to deal with before – they had to flip the home-field switch back to the 'on' position after a 2020 campaign where some stadiums weren't allowed any fans while others were permitted percentages of capacity. All that stuff still matters, but it matters a lot less than it used to.' They slept on their own beds, and they knew what the ground looked like and where the light reflected off of certain places. The home players were very much in their element. 'The away players had these jacked-up heart rates because they were going into a foreign environment.

There's an interesting one where they took a soccer match in Turkey and measured the away players' heart rate in the tunnel against the home players. 'There have been so many studies done on home field. 'Modern technology and modern science work against home-field advantage,' Croucher said. While you can't precisely draw accurate conclusions from a minuscule 31-game sample size, it's impossible to ignore how home field has become less important over the past five seasons when it comes to covering the spread. Through 31 true home games this NFL season, home teams are 15-16 (48%) straight up and 12-19 (39%) against the spread. The Cowboys beat the Chargers 20-17 as a three-point road underdog to validate Mike McCarthy's decision to let 30 seconds melt off the clock before sending his kicker out for a game-winning 56-yard field goal. Just seems like there are enough good and poor or unrealistic 'HFA's' here to branch this concept out into two distinct things so that they make a little more sense and to bring a little more balance in general to HFA's.Go figure.

Chicago wind affects both teams, Washington's poor field affects both teams, idk. Maybe have distinct Stadium traits and HFA's? Turf plays faster, grass plays a bit slower. So it's a good first attempt, but I think I'd rather see more generic momentum-based boosts for HFA tbh rather than these 'gimmicky' boosts that seem to exist solely to be different. I don't like ones like Detroit or Minnesota which give weird attribute boosts for simply hitting the HFA momentum objective which is the easiest one to get. I love that Denver has the fatigue effect because it's realistic, as well as the Miami, Chicago, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and even the Green Bay HFA's because they're realistic. I'm totally fine with other momentum-based achievements leading to actual attribute boosts to get that 'snowball' effect, but I just don't the Lions should accelerate faster for hitting their HFA objective which is the first one you get, right? Especially when other teams simply get 'more momentum' it just feels like Ford Field will have a bigger on-field HFA than many other teams.

IMO only realistic factors or momentum-related boosts should exist for the HFA's. It very well could be balanced, I didn't play the beta, but the principle of these boosts is what I take issue with. I'm so happy they're thinking about these things, but I don't think the implementation is well thought-out atm.

Madden nfl 22 home field advantage