The NFL’s Best Home Field Advantage: 2015 Edition
By Lucas Mitzel
Another NFL regular season is in the books, and I’m back to follow-up on a preseason topic.
In August, I took a look at the last five years’ worth of games to determine who had the best home field advantage in the league. I will note that I am missing one part of my metric from those seasons in that the playoffs are still ahead of us, but we can still figure out most of the rest of the data, and the impact probably won’t change a ton.
The following stats are combined to build a single score:
- Home wins: Each team receives one point per win. (Postseason wins count for two points and will be added later.)
- Attendance (Percent of capacity): Highest team receives 32 points, second highest team receives 31 points, etc.
- False starts drawn: Each team receives one point per false start penalty committed by opponents in their home games.
With these numbers in mind, let’s take a look at the rankings, pre-playoffs. In the event of a tie, teams will be ranked based on the stats above in that order (wins first, followed by attendance, then false starts).
- Philadelphia Eagles (46)
- Minnesota Vikings (45)
- Green Bay Packers (43)
- Dallas Cowboys (43)
- Seattle Seahawks (42)
- Denver Broncos (41)
- Indianapolis Colts (40)
- San Francisco 49ers (40)
- Arizona Cardinals (38)
- Carolina Panthers (35)
- Houston Texans (34)
- New England Patriots (32)
- Chicago Bears (31)
- Pittsburgh Steelers (30)
- New Orleans Saints (30)
- Baltimore Ravens (29)
- Miami Dolphins (29)
- Kansas City Chiefs (28)
- Buffalo Bills (27)
- Atlanta Falcons (27)
- Cincinnati Bengals (24)
- New York Jets (23)
- New York Giants (22)
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers (21)
- Detroit Lions (19)
- Cleveland Browns (18)
- Washington (17)
- Jacksonville Jaguars (17)
- Oakland Raiders (16)
- San Diego Chargers (15)
- St. Louis Rams (13)
- Tennessee Titans (11)
If you want to see the math that created this list, you can view this Google Sheet and click on the tab for 2015. I’ll be honest; I was shocked to see Philadelphia of all teams topping this list, but they’ve been near the top for a few seasons now and this season rode the seventh-highest attendance rate combined with a league-leading 17 false starts drawn at home to the top of the list. Your other usual suspects are near the top as well (Green Bay, Seattle, and Denver), though I scratch my head at some of this. The Packers went 5–3 at home in 2015, losing to the Vikings, Bears and Lions at home for the first time since 1991 and dropping all their home divisional contests for the first time since 1968. They were second in attendance though, and that drove them to third place behind the Vikings and into a tie with Dallas, who was really only there thanks to leading the league in home attendance.
The one that really shocks me is Carolina; they ran the table at home, but were 12th in attendance and only drew six false starts at home, relegating them to 11th place. The other weird one is the Bears. They went 1–7 at Soldier Field and only drew eight false starts there, but had one of the league’s higher attendance figures, putting them in the top half of the league.
The other note that I find amusing is at the bottom of the rankings. Tennessee was 1–7 at home, a large reason why they only managed 11 points, but the three teams above them are the three teams expected to apply for relocation to Los Angeles, and the Raiders, Rams and Chargers all finished in the bottom seven in attendance while combining for a 11–13 record at their home stadia.
Obviously with some of these curiosities, it makes this metric imperfect, and I’ll be the first to admit it. That said, when you think of the toughest places to play, most of the ones you think of for reasons like crowd noise and weather are at the top of the list.
There is a possibility that the rankings will change over the next three weeks; Philadelphia did not make the playoffs, and playoff teams with home games are within striking distance of the Eagles. I’ll update this following Championship Sunday and see where the rankings fall.