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

Bulldogs vs Gators

In my final Google Ngram contest, at least for 2010, we pit Bulldog against Gator to see which hallowed word received the most book mentions from 1800 to 2000.  The winner?  See below.  Blue is Bulldog, red is Gator.

Yeah, fine, Bulldog kicks Gator butt (do gators have butts?) What if we use the plural?  Ya know, Bulldogs vs. Gators? That hits a little closer to the mark, at least in nickname comparisons between UGA and UF.  See below.

Much closer and, indeed, Gators begin to pass the Bulldogs for a while in book mentions, though of late they are quite close.  The funny thing is, if you look specifically at the two terms, on Gators the top Google hits are about the football team while the top Google hits for Bulldogs is, um, the dog, as in Bulldogs for Dummies.  Sigh.

What does this have to do with the media and political knowledge?  Absolutely nothing.  Merely entertaining myself -- and probably only myself.