Home Sweet Home
Its time for the NCAA to add some limits on number of home games
The Michigan Wolverines will only don their away uniforms 4 times during the 2007 college football season. Their remaining 8 games will be played in the friendly confines of the big house in front of over 100,000 of the wolverine faithful. By contrast, the squad from San Jose State will board the bus 7 times with only 5 home games. The inequity in home/road games across division IA is widening. It is no secret that money drives this trend, but the NCAA needs to apply some limitations on the number of home games a team can use towards their six game postseason eligibility requirement.
Michigan is not alone; there are 16 division 1A teams that only have 4 road games. 9 of those 16 have neutral site games so tossing them out of the mix there are 7 teams that have 8 home games and only 4 on the road (Arizona State, Auburn, Kentucky, Michigan, Rutgers, Stanford & Vanderbilt). Theoretically, these teams could go 6 and 2 at home, lose every road game and end up bowl eligible. And what is the bowl game? Nothing more than a glorified road game which they would have shown through the year they are incapable of winning. On the other side of the gap there are 19 teams that have 7 road games (All from the MAC, Sun Belt, WAC and C-USA).
It’s an age old rule of thumb that home field advantage is worth three points. But let’s take a look at the numbers from last year for some data to help quantify home field advantage. During the course of the 2006 regular season, the home team in Division 1A football had a winning percentage of 0.629. This clearly shows the advantage the home team typically has.
There is a precedent of the NCAA attempting to limit padding of schedules with regards to non division 1A opponents. The NCAA instated limitations on the number of times a team could count a victory over a non division 1A opponent towards their six win postseason eligibility minimum. Now, a trend to pad schedules with home games is evident. Again, obviously money is a huge factor in this trend; however, it is affecting the ability to objectively look at a team’s win-loss record as a measure of the team. In order to preserve some meaning in a team’s win-loss record, the NCAA should require that only four of the six wins for postseason eligibility can be home wins. The remaining two could be either road or neutral site wins.
In the end, it’s all well and good for big name schools to favor home games given the revenue associated with home games in these markets. And it serves a purpose for the lesser opponents to go on the road with bigger name opponents to generate more revenue for their school. However, when judging a team’s caliber and their postseason worthiness, this should come into play. All of the major computer polls factor in home/road games via schedule strength, it follows that bowl eligibility should do the same. Finally, common sense dictates that the bowl game is a road game by nature, proving you are worthy of a bowl game should include proving you are capable of winning away from home.
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