NFL Home Field Advantage & Away Adjustment Chart

In this article we will try to calculate the true home field advantage for every NFL team based on the team’s performance at home and away.  The traditional value given to home teams in the spread is 3 points.  But the chances that every team is 3 points better at home as opposed to away is virtually nil.  The NY & LA teams share a stadium.  There are several teams who appear to have no home field advatage if you listen to the crowd during the game.  So instead of blindly giving every team 3 points for being at home, or simply guessing, let’s try to use a little math to see if we can come to real home field advatage values for every team.

Want to see Home Field Advantage for 2023 based on 2023 stats?: NFL 2023 – Home Field Advantage Values

Home Field Advantage

Every game from 2014 – 2023 was used in the calculation.  Each team had about 80 home and away games. I say about because I did not include neutral field games into the data.  This means depending on the amount of international games a team has played, each team had between 78 – 80 home and away games in the data.

The average home & away points for and against can be found in the chart below.  The offense’s and defense’s home & away points differentials were calculated, as was the team’s point differential home vs away.

Then it was a simple matter of using our friends standard deviation and normalization/standardization to award teams that perform better at home a larger home field advantage, while teams that perform poorly at home received a smaller advantage.  The minimum advantage was set to 1 point and the maximum at 4 points.

Using just this data, Cleveland had the lowest home field advantage at 1.1 points, while New England had the largest at 3.9 points.

The Away Adjustment

If you look at the last column, you see it labelled Away Modifier(Which I later came to call Away Adjustment).  If teams could have different home field advantage values, it would seem natural that they each would also have an Away Adjustment value based on how well they play on the road.  Anyone who has watched NFL football can empirically see that some teams play well on the road, while others almost start the game with no chance of winning.

So let’s use the same methodology to calculate an Away Adjustment for each team based on its away stats.  This scale will run from -3 to +3, though most teams will fall between -2 to +2.

• A negative value means the team plays better on the road compared to the other teams.
• A positive value means the team plays poorly on the road.

Over the past 10 years, for Away Adjustment, New England is the best road team at -1.8 points, while the Jets are the worst road team at +1.9 points.  The chart below shows  home field advatage and away adjustment values sorted from best to worst.

Home Field Advatage Matrix

Now let’s take the two values we have for each team and create a matrix.  The sum of the home team’s advantage plus the away team’s adjustment will be the final home field advatage value to use in the spread.

If we use color coding to identify the highest and lowest values more easily, the final Home Field Advantage Matrix looks like the chart below.  The home team is the row, the away team is the column.  Where they intersect is the calculate Home Field Advantage for the home team based on the past 10 years of data.

For example, if Arizona were to host Atlanta, Arizona’s home field advantage is calculated as being 1.7 points.  If Atlanta were to host Arizona, the Falcons’ home field advantage would be 2.0 points.

Arizona is a fairly weak home team with a base home field advantage of only 1.5 points.  Atlanta is a slightly weak road team with an Away Adjustment of +0.2 points.  This leads to the final Arizona value of 1.7 points when facing the Falcons at home

Atlanta has a base home field advatage of 2.3 points, but the Cardinals  play slightly better than average on the road leading to a -0.3 Away Adjustment.  This leads to Atlanta’s final home field advatage of 2.0 points against the Cardinals at home.

Thus the matrix gives a unique home field advantage value to any combination of home and away teams.

Average Home Field Advantage

The one intersting statistic that came from both the 10 year study and the 2023 data was that the average home field advantage when calculated in this manner is 2.5 points.  Average home field advantage was 2.5 points over 10 years worth of data, and it is 2.5 points looking at a fractional year’s worth of 2023 data.  So if you want to use a single value for any home team in any game, 2.5 points would appear to be a safe bet.