*Forty's Facts: So You Want to Win on The Road

[Forty Jordy]

So you want to win on the road, but you think the sim rigs it in favor for the home team?

In this edition of Forty’s Facts, we will look to see if this is in fact true and if it is true what trends can we pull out of the stat lines that show a difference between home and away teams. From these trends we will see what factors influence those trends and what you can do as a mitigation when playing on the road.

I want to make a quick note before we begin. The data set I chose was somewhat arbitrary due to the nature that a lot of the data I have was manually entered in by hand. I examined the first 6 games from season 20 and the first three games of season 21 for a total of 45 games.
Let first look at win percentage of home teams.

Code:

Home Win PCT: 64%

This is obviously a meaningful difference. The home team wins almost twice as many games than the away team. Let’s look at various stat lines and see if there is much of a difference between home and away teams



You can see the penalties is the immediate standout and it is actually almost the same ratio as home win ratio! This is obviously the biggest factor. Fumbles and interceptions don’t seem to play much of a role. In fact, there were only 22 lost fumbles in those 45 games. Not a large sample size for the 0.55 ratio to mean much. Third down conversion, yards, and points are also in favor of the home team, but I reckon this is more of a side effect and not a cause.

If you look at an any game on average home teams will have 2.7 penalties with 20 yards given to penalties and away teams will have 5.4 penalties with 43 yards given to penalties. Penalties appear to provide the edge to home teams allowing home teams to move the chains more often by converting more 3rd downs than away teams.

We will now investigate what factors play into penalties and how to then avoid them. We will see if intelligence plays into penalties by binning intelligence into groups and looking to see there is a correlation between intelligence and penalties.



Players under 50 intelligence have dramatically more penalties than those over 50. In fact there are 12 players in the 40-49 bin creating 32 penalties in 3 games, whereas there are 126 players in the 50-59 creating only 5 more penalties in those 3 games.

Let’s now break penalties down by position group.



The plot above shows offensive lineman dominate penalties, but there are also more of them. The plot below shows penalties per player.



Offensive linemen are much closer to other positions when viewed per player. The orange line tracing intelligence roughly show that there is an inverse relationship between intelligence and penalties per player. Besides quarterbacks, cornerbacks have the highest intelligence as well as lowest penalty rate. The reverse is true for defensive tackles.

The plot below breaks down penalties even further by binning intelligence into groups.



This is where my limited dataset starts to break down and outliers can be identified, namely 60-69 INT LB, 50-59 INT S, and 80-89 INT OL. Looking past the outliers which typically only have 1 data point, there is roughly a trend showing less penalties with more intelligence.

As a final plot let’s compare the number of penalties of each team for all nine games and compare it with their lost percentage. Lost percentage so that we can see if penalties increase then we should see a high lost percentage as well.



The trend seems to hold true across teams. Those who accrued more penalties had a higher percentage of losses.

Summary

Away teams accrue more penalties which correlates with losing and lower intelligence correlates with more penalties. If you can get your players to spend an extra 10-20 TPE to have at least 55-60 intelligence, you will likely have more success on the road.

Bonus
Here are some other things I calculated as well unrelated to home vs. away.

Of the 45 games:
-Those who won the turn-over battle won 69% of their games
-Those who won the 3rd down conversion battle won 76% of their games
-Those who won the time of possession battle won 80% of their games, averaging 32 minutes, 13 seconds of possession.

[AdamS]

Absolutely amazing work.

[Raven]

This is great

[Brucehum]

Superb article. Makes me want to hit the library with my rookie DT!