The Value of Homefield Advantage 2007 Week 7

One of the things I've learned in my football research is that the value of home-field advantage varies pretty widely from year to year, especially with interconference games. Because prediction systems tend to have a big bias towards the home team, this can have a large impact on accuracy. So throughout the season, I'll be keeping track of home team winning percentage and average final score margin (home team points - away team points) for interconference, interdivision, and intradivision matchups. If you're interested in that sort of thing, it can help you with betting on the spread (hint).

The pattern this season so far shows that you should bet on interconference home teams, especially if they're the underdogs, and stay away from intradivision games. There could be regression to the mean, but I don't believe it would be severe enough that betting on home teams in intradivision games would become good.

All Games
Home Team Win %: 59.2233%
Avg. Final Score Margin: 2.1553

Interconference
Home Team Win %: 69.2308%
Avg. Final Score Margin: 3.9231

Interdivision, Intraconference
Home Team Win %: 67.5676%
Avg. Final Score Margin: 4.5135

Intradivsion
Home Team Win %: 45.0000%
Avg. Final Score Margin: -1.1750