Home Advantage

7-06

Question
If Alabama NCAA Football team is playing an away game versus a
home game, will the win rate change?

Rationale
My experiment will benefit society in a few ways. One way it
will, is for Alabama to find ways to improve their own team. Alabama
can see if away games affect them and if they need to find a solution for
that, if there is no conclusive evidence away games versus home games
affect winning then Alabama will not have to worry about that. Another
way it can help is for other teams to know how to play, it may help other
teams when playing Alabama, but the teams may also use these statistics
to improve their own home/away win rate. This experiment can also
help fans to predict how the team will do and perhaps what games to be
critical of, and along the same lines it can help the coach who cant
really control some psychological level things.

Abstract
The reason for me doing this science fair project was to provide myself and others with data showing
if the NCAA football team Alabama did better or worse in an away game versus a home game. My problem was,
If Alabama NCAA Football team is playing an away game versus a home game, will the win rate change? to
help prove my hypothesis of, If there is a difference of home or away game, then it will not affect the rate of
winning for Alabama, because they strive to play just as well no matter what and if any credit was given to the
band, the band has the same opportunity of playing no matter what. I completed this by first find the total
amount of home and away games for each season, I then found how many wins there were for home and away
games in each season. After that I divided the amount of wins by the total amount of gams for that category.
From 2015-2010 scores generally followed my hypothesis but after that home percentages got much higher even
having an away game percentage of 0 in 2006.

Hypothesis
If there is a difference of home or away game, then it will not affect the
rate of winning for Alabama, because they strive to play just as well no
matter what and if any credit was given to the band, the band has the
same opportunity of playing no matter what.

Materials

ESPN NCAA Alabama scores from 2015 until 2006 college

football season

Mean equation

1 Dell computer

Procedure
1.
Go to ESPN NCAA Alabama football team scores for 2015
season
2.
Gather Scores except for the first game (both teams are away)
3.
Gather amount of wins for home games in Bryant Denny Stadium
4.
Gather amount of wins for away games; any other games not at
Bryant Denny Stadium except for 1st game of the season
5. Find average win rate for wins at home and wins away.
6. Record data
7.
Repeat steps 1-6 for past 9 seasons

Pictures

Results
Most of the time home games got higher win percentages than away
games, but in some cases such as the 2015 season the away games
percentage was higher.

Graph

*The total win percentage for home games: 91% Away: 84%

Conclusion
In this experiment my mission was to find if the NCAA Alabama
football team did better or worse between home games and away games. I
found the winning percentages for the 2015-2006 season home and away
games, excluding all games were both teams were away because not only was
I finding if Alabama did worse but opposing teams did better at home. I
discovered that generally the percentages were very close but as I worked my
way into past seasons I discovered that Alabama did immensely better at
home such as with the 2006 with an away percentage of 0. This did not
completely confirm my hypothesis, although in later years (2010 and
forward) the percentages went along more with my hypothesis. There was one
season were the percentages went against my hypothesis but no in the way
expected, the away percentage was 100% with a home percentage of 86%.
*note: I did not account for the larger room for error of home games (there
are more home games than away games.)

Resources
1.
Langager, Chad. "Home Field Advantage Broken Down By NFL
Team." - SportingCharts.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Sept. 2016.ource 1
2.
UTSportsTVFootball. "#VolReport: Team 119's Sleep Coaching."
YouTube. YouTube, 2015. Web. 26 Sept. 2016
3.
C., Bill, and Bill Connelly. "College Football's 5 Most Important
Stats." Football Study Hall. N.p., 2014. Web. 04 Oct. 2016.
4.
Athletic Band Task Force, College Band Directors National
Association. College and University Athletic Band Guidelines. N.p.: College
Band Directors National Association, May 2008. PDF.
5.
"Winning Percentage | FBS Football Statistics - NCAA.com." N.p.,
n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2016.