Home vs away in the post 2020 era

[Ghost of the HEB]

Here’s how we’ve faired in home and true away games in this era of Utah football (21,22,23):
Home
16-0
O: 36.6 PPG
D: 14 PPG
————————
Road
7-7
O: 26.2 PPG
D: 22.6 PPG
Is the RES effect so strong that it makes up for our deficiencies, or are we a great team that has just has road issues?

[2008 National Champ]

Too small a sample to be definitive. Of those 7, there’s really only two that could be considered “bad” losses.

’21 parochial school (10-3)
’21 San Diego State (12-2)
’21 Oregon State (7-6)
’22 Florida (6-7)
’22 UCLA (9-4)
’22 Oregon (10-3)
’23 Oregon State (6-1 currently)

combined record of the teams they lost to is 60-26 (.697). Not many teams in the country win consistently on the road against that quality

[2008 National Champ]

At the same time, Utah’s 7 wins are not very impressive.

’21 USC (4-8 and had just fired their coach)
’21 Stanford (3-9)
’21 Arizona (1-11 in first year with new coach)
’22 Arizona State (3-9 and had just fired their coach)
’22 WSU (7-6)
’22 Colorado (1-11)
’23 Baylor (currently 2-4)

combined record 21-60 (.259). With the exception of the ’22 Florida and ’22 WSU, Utah loses to teams with winning records on the road and beats the teams they should. It really isn’t any more intuitive than that.

[Ghost of the HEB]

So, we always beat bad teams on the road, and always lose to good teams on the road. That logic checks out, but doesn’t bode well for our chances against SC and Washington.

[2008 National Champ]

Now that we’ve established the rule, it’s time to start finding the exceptions. Saturday seems as good a time as any

[Tony (admin)]

All of these stats make me more unsure than I was before I read them.

[SalUteopia]

The real question to me is: what causes the away performance to be so different? Is it the prep, the lack of familiarity, the hostile environment (let’s be honest, there are maybe 2-3 hostile environments in P12)? And the RES atmosphere is amazing, but is it really that much of a difference maker? For example, I feel more confident of our UO game than the away UA game (relatively speaking that is), and purely because we get UO at home.
So is this purely psychological, and is there no way to address it?

[2008 National Champ]

There’s a reason that the oddsmakers give anywhere from 3 to 7 points for home field advantage v neutral field. When two fairly evenly matched teams face each other, that’s a huge advantage.

I also track the Team Talent Composite and the actual results say that since 2015, the more talented team on the road wins 56% of the time while they win 70% at home. That means that it’s not a Utah issue, it’s a CFB issue.

[SalUteopia]

Yeah, it seems like a CFB-wide issue. And I’m guessing even that 56% number is propped up by the elite teams. Somehow I feel, and this might be a homer take, that Utah is capable of getting over this hump, but for whatever reasons it hasn’t happened (yet).

[2008 National Champ]

I took all of the FCS teams out but there are still a lot of G5 at P5 games in that dataset which would seem to inflate the home number.

Edit:

G5 v G5: road 676-1300 (52.0%), home 828-1327 (62.4%)
P5 v P5: road 823-1392 (59.1%), home 969-1384 (70.0%)
P5 v G5: road 136-202 (67.3%), home 580-682 (85.0%)

[CityCreekUte]

College refs are notoriously bad (not just PAC12 ones hehe) and they have consistently been shown to favor the home team. As opposed to the NFL where they are all well paid professionals, the pool of refs is tiny compared to all the weekend refs that college gets. Think about it, NFL about a dozen games a weekend. NCAA (FBS) around 50. The college product is tribal from start to finish and the refs are part of it.

[bopahull]

Does that mean the refs thought we were the visiting team?

[Tony (admin)]

Ha!