Scorecasting (20 page)

Finally, we noticed that home field advantage in soccer is the same in countries such as the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, where travel distances are minuscule, as it is in countries as vast as the United States, Russia, Australia, and Brazil. It is yet another indication that travel isn’t much of a factor.

By halftime, the Blazers had whittled the San Antonio lead to three points. If both teams appeared fatigued—lacking “fresh legs,” to use the basketball vernacular—it was with good reason. They had both played a game the previous night.

Because of the physical demands of running up and down a court for 48 minutes, it’s exceedingly difficult to compete at full strength on consecutive nights. On the second night of back-to-back games, NBA teams win only 36 percent of the time. It was Charles Barkley who once referred to second games as “throwaways.” In his inimitably candid way, he once explained, “You show up because they pay you to show up. But deep in your belly, you know you ain’t gonna win.”

Okay, we’ve discounted the effect of the “grueling” travel. But what about the fact that
visiting teams
play the vast majority of back-to-back games? Could that influence the home court advantage in the NBA? We think it does. And this particular Spurs-Blazers game notwithstanding, the vast majority of back-to-back games are played by road teams. Of the 20 or so back-to-back games NBA teams play each season, an average of 14 occur when they’re on the road. That alone affects the home court advantage in the NBA. By our calculations, you are expected to win only 36 percent of those 14 games relative to your normal chances of winning on the road when you aren’t playing back-to-back games. That translates into one or two additional games you will lose each season on the road because of this scheduling twist. In other words, home teams are essentially spotted an advantage of one or two games relative to road teams just from the NBA’s scheduling of consecutive games.

It’s not just the back-to-back games. Home teams not only play fewer consecutive games but also play fewer games in general within the same time span, such as the last three days or the last week or even the last two weeks. All this takes its toll on visitors. We estimate that about 21 percent of the home court advantage in the NBA can be attributed to the league’s scheduling. Adjusting for this scheduling effect, the home court advantage drops down to 60 percent. So part of the explanation for the very high
NBA home court advantage is the way the league is arranging the schedule.

Recently, there were internal discussions—ultimately fruitless—in the NBA about reducing the season from 82 games to 75 games. The first games that would have been cut? The notorious back-to-back road games.

The league will tell you that the bunching together of a team’s road games in as few days as possible is done to economize on travel. But by accident or design, it has the effect of working to the detriment of teams on the road. And it’s not the only evidence suggesting that the league prefers to see home teams win. For instance, in home openers, the majority of teams start the season against weak opponents who had either inferior or similarly poor records the previous season. Just look at the
Sacramento Kings and
Washington Wizards, the two worst teams in 2008–2009; they started the 2009–2010 season playing five road games between them.

Says one NBA owner: “If only [fans] knew how the NBA scheduled games. Teams submit blocked dates for their arena [i.e., dates when the circus is using the building or the NHL team is using the facility]. The NBA picks ‘marquee TV match-ups,’ and then one guy figures out the rest with marginal help from software. Teams kiss his ass because we know he can throw more losses at us than Kobe can!”

To test the role of economic incentives, the most valuable NBA franchises, according to numbers from
Forbes
, are afforded a slightly stronger scheduling bias, as are teams in big markets. Yes, all teams play more consecutive games on the road than at home, but it’s less so for the most valuable franchises in the biggest markets.

Remember how in most seasons
every
NBA team, even the Clippers, fares better at home than on the road? One look at an NBA schedule, and it starts to make sense why that is the case. When teams leave the comforts of home, they get hammered by the schedule makers, playing as many as three games in four nights, seldom in any logical order.

Seen through this lens, the action unfolding during the Portland–San Antonio game becomes clearer. The Blazers not only had
played the night before at Houston (and lost) but had played four games in the week leading up to their game with the Spurs with only one day of rest between games. The Spurs meanwhile had played only three games the previous week and hadn’t traveled in the last four days. If you take our numbers on back-to-back road games and factor in that Portland had also played one more game than San Antonio in the last week, the Blazers’ chances of winning fall to less than one in three, which puts it in the vicinity of “ain’t no way we’re winning this motherf——” territory.

What about other sports? As in the NBA, teams in the NHL are brutalized by back-to-back games, which also occur disproportionately on the road. As physically demanding as the NBA is, the NHL may be even more taxing. In a typical season, road teams will play six more consecutive games than home teams do, which translates into about one or two extra home victories per team per season.

Scheduling is less of an issue in baseball; the 162-game schedule is set up so that teams play in three-, four-, and five-game series. When teams travel, they get to stay put in the visiting city, and the consecutive games have less of a physical effect on the athletes. The player who exerts himself the most—the pitcher—plays only once every five games.

In the NFL, the one league that publicly and unapologetically strives for parity—“any given Sunday” your team could beat the other team—there is virtually no evidence of scheduling bias. Even in home openers, the most successful NFL teams are not favored. In fact, we find the opposite: NFL teams that did well the previous season are more likely to face a
better
opponent in their opening home game than they are to face a team that did poorly last season.

By contrast, in
college sports, scheduling plays a
huge
role in the home team advantage. College boosters would have you believe that the exceptionally high winning percentage in NCAA sports is a consequence of rabid school spirit, the pep bands and cheerleaders, and those exuberant undergrads annoying opponents with witty cheers and taunts. But most followers of college sports are
likely to guess what’s really driving a large part of the high home field advantage. It’s the scheduling of weak opponents—cupcakes, patsies, sacrificial lambs, road kill, call them what you will—early in the season.

Although the NCAA and the conferences set the schedule for most “in-season” games, the individual schools are generally free to negotiate their own preseason schedules. At large schools, there is an incentive to pad teams’ records early in the season. Stacking the scheduling deck in their favor, teams from the six “big” football conferences—the Big Ten, Pac-10, SEC, ACC, Big 12, and Big East—win almost 90 percent of their home openers. In addition to pleasing the crowd, especially those cotton-head donors sitting in the prime seats, early success bolsters the team’s chances of reaching the postseason bowls and tournaments, which come with a direct financial payoff and, generally, a spike in alumni contributions.

At small schools, there are incentives to play along. One is to raise revenue. Often, playing at Big State U ensures a monetary reward far superior to what the team could have earned playing a smaller opponent. In 2006, for instance, the small-time football program at Florida Atlantic University was paid $500,000 to play at Clemson in the season opener. FAU then reportedly made an additional $1.325 million playing its next three games
at
Kansas State, Oklahoma State, and South Carolina. From those four road games alone, they covered a sizable chunk of the annual operating expenses for their entire athletic department. But they lost the four road games by a combined score of 193–20.

Less cynically, like any underdog, small schools also thrill at the chance to “make a name for themselves” and elevate their profile on the off chance that the team can spring an upset. (Who had even heard of the small Hawaiian school Chaminade before its basketball team’s momentous upset of a Ralph Sampson–led top-ranked Virginia team in 1982?) Even in defeat, the small school usually appears on national television, a big draw to potential recruits. Plus, the players leave with a sense of how far they are—sometimes it’s not very—from the next level of competition. In short, everybody usually benefits from this arrangement.

It’s worth noting that scheduling a “patsy” opponent can backfire financially, sometimes spectacularly. In 2007, the
University of Michigan football team (ranked fifth in the nation at the time) lost its home opener to tiny Division I-AA Appalachian State. Not only did such a disgraceful defeat ruin any chance of Michigan playing in a big (read: well-paying) bowl game regardless of what happened the rest of the season, but such an embarrassing loss—at home!—surely had an effect on alumni donations.

We found that home schedule padding accounts for roughly half of the home team advantage in college football. If we adjust for the quality of teams—or look at in-conference games, where the conference and not the big schools sets the schedule—home team winning percentage drops from 64 percent to 57 percent. Incredibly enough, that 57 percent is almost the exact same rate at which the home teams win in both the NFL and Arena football. For college hoops the numbers are similar. Of the impressive 69 percent home court advantage in NCAA basketball, a little more than half can be explained by early-season schedule padding. Accounting for these scheduling biases and strength of opponent, the home advantage in college basketball declines to 63 percent, the same as in the NBA.

But scheduling bias gets us only so far. It accounts for half of the home field advantage in college sports; it partially explains the home field advantage in the NBA and NHL. In Major League Baseball and the NFL—and, as it turns out, in soccer as well—it doesn’t explain it at all.

Fulfilling the Portland coach’s prophecy, the Spurs pulled away in the second half and beat the Blazers handily, 99–84, in a contest that was virtually uncontested. From the start, the Blazers competed with no urgency or passion, missing nearly two-thirds of their shots and giving only periodic consideration to defense, as
if resigned to defeat. The postgame locker room hardly called to mind the picture of despair. Just one more game in Minnesota and the road trip would be over. “A few more days, man,” said the Blazers’ center,
Greg Oden, who hadn’t even played that night. “A few more days and we get to go home.”

As for the Spurs, they played generally unimpeachable
basketball. They competed capably, defended capably, and shot the ball well. Unmistakably, the star of the game was Parker, who darted around the court, scoring 39 points in 35 minutes. In a battle of images, Spurs coach
Gregg Popovich gushed that Parker was “a superstud again.” Nate McMillan, the Portland coach, likened Parker to “a roadrunner blowing by us.”

Sterlingly as Parker had played, he was, by his own admission, at his best when paired with Tim Duncan. In addition to coaching the team, Popovich was the team’s chief architect, and his decision to draft Parker as a complement to Duncan’s inside presence was a coup that had paid immense dividends—not least multiple NBA titles. The twenty-eighth selection in 2001, Parker represents one of the great steals in recent NBA drafts. When making personnel decisions, Popovich told us that he considers dozens of factors: How will the players fit into the tapestry of the team? How much will they cost? How will they feel knowing they’ll be operating in the considerable shadows of the Spurs’ three stars? How will they acclimate to a “small market” that lacks the beaches of Los Angeles and the nightlife of New York and Miami?

What he doesn’t worry about is how they will play specifically in the AT&T Center. From arena to arena, the baskets are 10 feet off the ground and 94 feet apart, 15 feet from the free throw line. Throughout the NBA, the playing surface is standardized. The games are always played indoors in climate-controlled venues. Even the placement of the decals on the court must conform to league regulations. It’s the same in the NHL. For all intents, a rink is a rink is a rink.

In the NFL, each field is 120 yards long, including the end zones, and roughly 53 yards wide; but the climate and playing conditions can vary immensely. A December game in San Diego, California,
is played in a much different environment than a December game in Buffalo, New York. Is the home field advantage in football influenced by teams tailoring their rosters to the weather?