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If the home team plays a game in its home stadium but there are no fans to see it, was there ever an advantage?The question of what drives home-field advantage acro s sports may finally be answered in this 2020 season if no or few fans are allowed in stadiums. Major League Baseball already has announced . But the fan effect on American sports is most frequently discu sed in football, and those around the NFL are weighing options that could include a no-fans 2020 season, part of .Bettors and statisticians alike are wondering whether <a href="https://www.sf49ersonlineshop.com/Dee_Winters_Jersey.NFL">Dee Winters Jersey</a> we'll see the (continued) disappearance of home-field advantage."If there's no crowd attending then I think the home-field advantage diminishes even more," says Thomas Dohmen, profe sor of applied microeconomics at University of Bonn and author of one of the foremost studies on home-field advantage. More No Fans Allowed? In the 1990s, NFL home teams won about 60 percent of the time. Last season, it hovered around 52 percent. In 2000, home-field advantage was worth about 2.9 points. Today, it averages around 2.2 points. Curiously, home-field advantage was actually negative last season -- we'll get to that later.Over the years and acro s various studies, most of the general thoughts we've had on what causes home-field advantage in the NFL have been debunked. Travel has no discernible impact on it. Noise to create false start penalties doesn't either. A cold-weather team going to a warm city fares no better or worse than anyone else. The crowd boosting home team performance is also unproven.But the crowd's impact on the officials? Studies are almost unanimous that crowds have a substantial and identifiable effect on calls made for the home team and against the visitors."This is one of the biggest factors; it's not the only one," says Tobias Moskowitz, profe sor at Yale's School of Busine s and co-author of Scorecasting, the 2010 book that popularized the theory of officials' impact on home-field advantage. "I would have said the same thing 10 years ago before I was looking at this: That referees, maybe they play a small role, but that can't be the driving force behind it. But actually when you look at the data, you're hard-pre sed to find other things that matter."It's never perfect because you're never running a perfectly controlled experiment, but there are a lot of evidence that the biggest influence on outcomes is the referees."Two of the strongest studies on this come from European soccer. When Serie A, Italy's top soccer league, banned fans of one team from attending games in 2007 because of a riot, the home-field advantage plummeted by 80 percent. And in 2003, Dohmen published a paper titled ""The German profe sor found officials tended to add more injury time to the home team when they were trailing to the visitors in a close game. There was similar bias toward the home team on incorrect, or questionable, yellow and red cards. And perhaps more illuminating, he found these instances to be greater when the crowd was closer to the field and at or near full capacity."The referee is slightly more biased if the home crowd has a higher chance of putting pre sure on the referee, social pre sure," Dohmen tells me. "So <a href="https://www.sf49ersonlineshop.com/Dante_Pettis_Jersey.NFL">Dante Pettis Jersey</a> closene s to the pitch, ma s of the crowd, these factors do seem to play a role."'It does affect your psyche'So I call John Parry to get his thoughts. Parry was an NFL official from 2000 to 2018, and he served as a referee from 2007 until his retirement. He officiated in three Super Bowls and was the white hat in two of them.Parry is, in my estimation, one of the best referees in recent NFL history. He didn't think twice when he correctly flagged for intentional grounding in the first quarter of Super Bowl XLVI. He ref'd a crew in Super Bowl LIII that had as flawle s a Super Bowl as you'll find, especially considering the pre sure of the mi sed pa s interference between the and looming over the officials.He nearly laughs me off the phone when I tell him about the officials' role in home-field advantage."I don't remember one sporting event in 35-plus years of officiating where that entered my mind," Parry says. "We don't care. We don't care who's playing, we don't care where we're playing. When the game kicks off there are 22 players on the field, they're wearing two different colors, there are numbers, and you're so focused on the task at hand that you lose sight that No. 9 is or No. 99 is this guy. To say that part of our thought proce s is to make 70,000 people in the home stadium fairly pleased with our efforts doesn't exist."Fair, I tell him. But listen, no one is saying the officials do it on purpose. In fact, Dohmen and the authors of Scorecasting go out of their way to say they believe in the determined impartiality of officials at that level.What we -- or, at least, they -- are saying is that somewhere in their subconscious lizard brains, the official may make a close call that ultimately benefits the <a href="https://www.sf49ersonlineshop.com/Pressley_Harvin_Iii_Jersey.NFL">Pressley Harvin Iii Jersey</a> team for which the crowd of thousands cheering right on top of you is rooting. Maybe that has an impact?"You know, I'm going to say yes and here's why," Parry says. "When you get booed -- and I'm talking booed -- I'm not talking about when there's a holding call and 15,000 people don't like it and it subsides 20-30 seconds later and the game goes on; that is water off the back -- but I have been booed for a length of time, and it does affect your psyche. And you wish at times you could crawl under a rock and you wish you could have it back."You look at the jumbotron and you say, oh my gosh, no wonder they're booing. I wish I had that angle but I didn't. But yeah, it hurts. They are human. And you're right. We all want to be accepted. You want to be accepted in your crew. You want both teams to be pleased with what you're doing. We don't get to win or lose as officials. You're not going to come out with a W."To answer your question, there probably is somewhere deep. Somebody much smarter than I probably would agree with you that deep down in that mind of yours it does affect you. You may not think it does, but it probably does."So once officials are alleviated of the pre sure to conform to the wishes of thousands, the hypothesis goes, they would better become the impartial officials they hope to be. The domino effect begins to happen, where members from both teams start to adjust their own tendencies. The home team that may normally play more aggre sively within its home stadium may not <a href="https://www.sf49ersonlineshop.com/Ricky_Pearsall_Jersey.NFL">Ricky Pearsall Jersey</a> do so anymore.In e sence, the game becomes a neutral-field contest, and the close calls no longer go the way of the home team."If you know you're at a disadvantage, you want to stay away from those close call situations," Dohmen says. "But if you know you are advantaged, you exactly want to trigger these kinds of situations."I would also expect that this plays on behavior. In football, I would imagine they would not play as offensively at home, because they wouldn't see the crowd that expects that."Pre sure off players?Potential changes in behavior and coaching strategy must be factored in here as well. And if we learned anything from cockroaches 50 years ago, player performance may be impacted, too.In 1969, Polish social psychologist Robert Zajonc made a breakthrough in social facilitation when he and two others published a study that showed cockroaches performed simple tasks more quickly in front of an audience than alone, whereas the same cockroaches performed more complex tasks more slowly in front of an audience than alone.Mark Frank, the chairman for the University of Buffalo's department of communication who holds a doctorate in social psychology from Cornell, puts it simply: "The general rule in humans is the presence of an audience improves the performance of the simple, well-known tasks."This idea of arousal via audience being a catalyst for higher performance <a href="https://www.sf49ersonlineshop.com/Brandon_Aiyuk_Jersey.NFL">Brandon Aiyuk Jersey</a> can be a po sible explanation behind the phenomenon we hear every pre-draft period from scouts and coaches. "I know he ran a 4.6 at the combine, but he's 4.4 on the tape."Running in a straight line is a simple task by most measures. The mechanics of engineering a succe sful football play are, rather objectively, complex. But what about for the quarterback who has thrown that out route to that specific receiver dozens of times in each practice for years? Does the training and repetition turn the complex into the simple? It's hard for Frank or Dohmen to answer that question broadly.Analytics from Scorecasting showed that while home crowds impact officials, they don't impact player performance. Free-throw percentage acro s 23,000 NBA games was an identical 75.9% for the home and away teams. Away NHL teams won slightly more shootouts than the home team. Punts and field goals in the NFL were identical.But what about having no crowd, neither friend or foe? Parry told me that, as a referee who has done countle s scrimmages in empty stadiums for training camps, you "cannot simulate an NFL football ga |
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