NFL Home Field Advantage: Ranking Toughest NFL Stadiums, 2025

Said another way, weight distributions should be safely significant (i.e. they don’t straddle 0) and test results should rarely exhibit negative overfit performance. Using the tools above, you can see that each of these teams have had prolonged periods of both meaningfully high and meaningfully low home field advantage with many seasons spent below the average for the rest of the league. As nfelo analysis shows, the traditional flat 2.5-point model fails to account for a variety of factors that contextually impact home field advantage on a game to game basis. Because home field advantage materially impacts expected margin of victory and win probability, it has become a fundamental concept in sports betting, as it directly impacts point spreads, moneylines, and totals across all NFL games. Crowd noise significantly impacts NFL games by increasing offensive pre-snap and holding penalties, as evidenced by the 2020 season’s data. They recorded a sizable dropoff in generating offensive pre-snap and offensive holding penalties on opponents in 2020 compared with the averages in Buffalo’s surrounding seasons in these categories.

• Oddly, the Chiefs and the Brady-led Tampa Bay Buccaneers were only 5-3 as hosts.
• The standout for Seattle was the home versus road average we detailed in the team introduction stats.
• A team that plays unusually weak teams at home in the past is likely to play harder teams at home in the future, resulting in a future HFA that is actually negatively correlated with past HFA.
• For Analysis Group 2, the effect size compared plant response to mycorrhizal inoculation in sympatric versus allopatric pairings, and thus was a direct assessment of local adaptation or maladaptation.

The Chiefs rank fourth overall at generating offensive pre-snap and offensive holding penalties on opposing offenses in games at Arrowhead Stadium, although those infractions only accounted for 37% of opponent penalties. Stadium noise is at its peak level before the visiting offense snaps the ball, with home crowds impacting offensive pre-snap and subsequently offensive holding infractions at a far higher rate than any other penalty category throughout the course of a game. Yes, research shows that referees can contribute to home advantage through biased decision-making. Studies have found that officials tend to award more contentious decisions and fewer penalties to home teams. However, the introduction of technologies like VAR (Video Assistant Referee) has somewhat reduced this bias, although it hasn’t eliminated it entirely.

The natural experiment also highlighted geographical variations in crowd effects. German teams accustomed to larger crowds showed more dramatic reductions in home advantage compared to teams used to smaller attendances 6. Consequently, leagues with traditionally higher attendance rates experienced greater disruption to home advantage during the pandemic period 7. Without crowds, home teams received more yellow cards across all game states – leading, trailing, or drawing – indicating that crowd presence typically influences referee decisions independently of match context 18. This finding underscores how crowd support shapes officiating decisions even in seemingly neutral situations.

Mediation by soil of plant adaptation to arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi

Climate and altitude emerge as powerful contributors to home advantage, primarily through their physiological impact on visiting teams. At high altitudes, the air becomes notably thinner, reducing oxygen pressure and negatively affecting endurance activities 10. Coaches set more challenging targets and choose more aggressive tactics when playing at home 3. They also field more offensive players and express less satisfaction with draws at halftime during home games 3. Players with higher testosterone levels generally demonstrate lower anxiety, although this pattern can vary between individual and team sports 6.

In doing so, we will consider additional factors such as the location of the game and the quarterback ratings. By incorporating these elements, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of the factors influencing game outcomes, allowing us to draw more informed and nuanced conclusions. We analyzed the NFL Elo dataset provided by FiveThirtyEight, which contains historical data on NFL games and Elo ratings for each team. The dataset covers games from the beginning of the league in 1920 through the 2021 season.

Dataset construction

Over these relatively short windows, the slope is actually slightly negative, potentially due to scheduling. A team that plays unusually weak teams at home in the past is likely to play harder teams at home in the future, resulting in a future HFA that is actually negatively correlated with past HFA. Opposing team fans are beginning to make up a larger portion of the crowd in Seattle, and the Seahawks’ penalty advantage numbers have declined as a result.

The Winter Olympics present even more pronounced effects for male athletes, with approximately 50% larger home advantage compared to Summer Games 1. Curiously, female athletes showed no significant home advantage in Winter Olympics during this period 1. Studies indicate that when competitions lack equal home-away distribution, traditional metrics prove inadequate 1. In these cases, researchers must account for team quality and participation rates to reach unbiased conclusions regarding venue effects. Referee decisions emerge as a crucial factor in determining home advantage across professional sports.

We’ve compiled statistics on which stadiums create the biggest headaches for opposing offenses, both pre- and post-snap, using data with and without crowds in attendance to measure their impact. We know this because NFL stadiums largely absent of fans in 2020 coincided with a big dropoff in these penalty categories versus every other season on record. The north ruled in this category, with the AFC North ranking No. 1 in overall penalty advantage, followed closely by the NFC North. The fact is, some teams win in spite of a lackluster home field edge, and vice versa.

This study underscores the potential to detect local adaptation for mycorrhizal relationships across a broad swath of the literature. These results highlight the need for subsequent investigations of local adaptation in the mycorrhizal symbiosis and emphasize the importance of routinely considering the origin of plant, soil, and fungal components. Previous research has emphasized the role of abiotic factors in driving local adaptation of organisms to their local environment, but biotic factors may also greatly alter an organism’s fitness in their local environment 2–5. Moreover, in a symbiotic interaction, particularly in the case of an obligate symbiosis, understanding co-adaptation between symbionts and between them and the local environments is essential for local adaptation. Although limited by the amount of available data, our results represent an important first step in addressing local adaptation of a symbiosis.

Thus, the current lack of generalizable patterns in HFA across ecosystems and biomes reflects both limited empirical studies and insufficient understanding of the critical drivers governing this process. This hypothesis has been empirically tested in various ecosystems via reciprocal litter transplant experiments (Sun & Zhao 2016; Veen et al. 2018; Sun et al. 2020). The HFA primarily stems from the long-term co-evolutionary relationship between decomposer communities and local litter characteristics. This reciprocal adaptation process leads to the development of specialized feeding preferences among decomposers for locally-adapted litter, while their ecological interactions create positive feedback loops (Pugnaire et al. 2023). These synergistic mechanisms ultimately result in more efficient decomposition of native compared to non-native litter substrates (Joly et al. 2023; Oliva et al. 2023). HFA plays a critical role in soil ecosystems, such as soil biodiversity maintenance, nutrient cycling and soil heterogeneity (Austin et al. 2014; Joly et al. 2023; Oliva et al. 2023).

The AFL stadium analysis provides a range of statistics for each team at each stadium. The AFL predictability index ranks each team based on the predictability of their score lines using pre-game bookmaker lines. Please take these figures with a grain of salt because some postseason fixtures at neutral venues have not been appropriately accounted for. For these fixtures the «home» team was arbitrarily assigned to one of the two sides.

Indianapolis is more efficient and/or benefits from officiating at a far higher rate at home, ranking eighth in home versus road penalty per game average. The good news is the Broncos once again have the head coach and roster in place to take full advantage of their unique home field edge, all but ensuring road games at Mile High will be a daunting proposition for opponents in 2025 and beyond. The key stat detailing all-important offensive pre-snap and offensive holding infractions on opponents at Mile High Stadium roobet apk was the foundation of the team’s penalty superiority. The Dawg Pound is as impactful as any home crowd we’ve detailed in this analysis, and this franchise’s shortcomings are in no way a result of lackluster crowd support. The 2020 season saw a big decline in opponent penalties overall compared with the surrounding seasons, particularly in the aforementioned offensive pre-snap and offensive holding categories. The catalyst from a penalty perspective was Cleveland ranking seventh at generating offensive pre-snap and offensive holding infractions on opposing offenses.