Thursday, November 13, 2014

No Home Favorite

It's a big weekend here in Athens when we host the Deep South's oldest football rivalry, Auburn vs. Georgia. While losses on both sides make it of less national significance than many expected, down here both sides take it seriously.

It's also a game where, unlike is usual, being the visitor is not so bad a thing.

UGA is a 2.5-point favorite this Saturday. That sounds about right, and you might guess it has to do with the game being in Athens versus being played on the loveliest village on the plain, but there's also a semi-tradition that the home team often loses in this match-up.

But is that really the case? Let's look at the data.

To keep it simple and modern, I'll only go back 20 years ago, to 1994 (a tie, by the way). Since 1994, the home team is 8-11-1 (see table at bottom). In other words, the home team has won eight times in 20 games -- assuming I'm reading the data right. There's even a stretch of five straight games in which the home team lost, cementing what seems to be a semi-expectation in recent years, one broken by the godless Prayer at Jordan-Hare last year.

So, is eight home wins bad? Well, it's less than 50 percent. The easy and wrong comparison would be to look at how often either Auburn or Georgia win their home games, but that would include cupcake teams paid to fill out the schedule. A better comparison might be to take an SEC rival and see how well either Auburn or Georgia does against them, home and away. The problem with that approach is teams often get on streaks. Take UGA vs Tennessee, for example. UGA has won the last five, and there's a nine-game stretch in the 1990s that the Vols won.  How about the Dawgs vs. South Carolina? In the last 10 games, it's an even 5-5 split in terms of home versus visitor wins, so perhaps there's something a little special about the Auburn-Georgia game -- the ties the programs share, the geographic proximity, the oldest Deep South rivalry.



Year
Winner
1994
Tie
1995
Visitor
1996
Visitor
1997
Visitor
1998
Visitor
1999
Visitor
2000
Home
2001
Visitor
2002
Visitor
2003
Home
2004
Home
2005
Visitor
2006
Visitor
2007
Home
2008
Visitor
2009
Home
2010
Home
2011
Home
2012
Visitor
2013
Home







No comments: