My own observation, however, seems to conflict with the lore of home field advantage. It seems to me that more often than not, in MVL play the better team wins regardless of the superfluous factors like the playing field. After all, just this past season Sheridan defeated Maysville 83-0 at Maysville's homecoming. There seemed little advantage in the home field that night. So the question begins to take shape, "Does home field advantage exist in MVL play?" Armed with MVL football data from 1981 to the present I began upon the task of finding the statistical reality of the home field advantage as it pertains to the MVL.
We'll start with the big numbers. From 1981 through 2004 there have been 1,062 MVL football contests. The home team has won 560 of those games, giving the home team a record of 560-499-3, (0.527). The 2.7 percentage points above the 0.500 mark can lead us to say that at least statistically about 3 of every one hundred MVL wins are attributable to home field advantage. This sounds like quite a few, but with only 36 MVL games played in a season, this actually breaks down to less than one per year. Not a big advantage at all.
A slight advantage can also be seen in points scored. Over the same period, home teams have averaged 18.80 points per game, compared to 17.79 for the visitors, giving a differential of +1.01. The league average PPG for that period was 18.30, so again the home field advantage only gives a slight edge, about +0.5 points per game, to the home team.
If we look for a trend in scoring differential over the 24-year period there is really nothing of note. As is seen in the following graph, the point differential shifts from year to year, but is quite erratic and is not amenable to mathematical curve fitting.
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I have claimed that the home field advantage is very slight in MVL play, and that can be substantiated, in part, by looking at the home field advantage in the NFL. If we take the point differential for all 1,062 games of our current study, and find the average per game difference we are left with a 1.13-point advantage for the home team. The NFL advantage has been calculated at 2.531, more than double our difference (an enormous difference in statistical terms). The difference in intra-conference College Football is even greater, closer to 4 points per game. So, we can be confident that the advantage in MVL play is only marginal.
In researching for this article, I learned of an interesting phenomenon. It has been noted that in professional football, the home field advantage becomes greater later in the season. I would assume the reason for this has to do with the weather changes across the country in the later weeks of the season (It is much more difficult for Tampa Bay to beat the Packers at Lambeau in December than in August). With this in mind, I wondered if the same difference could be seen in the MVL. The following table shows what I found.
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Notice the dramatic shift in the later weeks of the NFL season. As was probably expected, this trend cannot be found in MVL play. This seems to confirm my suspicion that weather is the contributing factor in the NFL variance, as the weather does not change much from Thornville to Warsaw.
My most interesting find came when I started to think about the effect that distance traveled might have on games. One would expect that a visiting team would be more likely to lose games that are played in far away locals as opposed to closer venues. This has not been the case, in fact the trend is almost opposite of what one might expect. The following table shows that in games of great geographical distance the team that made the long bus trip actually outperforms the home team, while in closer games the margin is less favorable to the visitors.
| Distance in Miles | W | L | T | PCT | PT Difference |
| Greater than 40 | 33 | 33 | 0 | 0.500 | -0.18 |
| 36 through 40 | 21 | 25 | 0 | 0.457 | -2.02 |
| 31 through 35 | 64 | 52 | 0 | 0.552 | 1.13 |
| 26 through 30 | 98 | 93 | 1 | 0.510 | 0.45 |
| 21 through 25 | 73 | 70 | 1 | 0.507 | 1.06 |
| 16 through 20 | 163 | 125 | 0 | 0.566 | 1.91 |
| 11 through 15 | 114 | 100 | 0 | 0.533 | 1.39 |
| Less than 10 | 49 | 46 | 1 | 0.510 | 1.34 |
This seems surprising, but the anomaly here may be explained away by the small sample size of games at great distances. Only a few games have been played at greater than 35 miles distance and as such a lopsided score in one or two of those games could greatly skew the averages.
I think we can come away from all of this hullabaloo with a few things we didn't have before. To begin with, the existence of home field advantage in the MVL is a statistical reality, but a reality with little force. We might also claim that the close distance of high school football contests tend to marginalize home field advantage as travel is not much of a factor, and visiting teams often bring a substantial number of backers with them from town to town. It would be interesting to see statewide numbers on the home field advantage phenomena. I would like to know how the MVL numbers stack up against other leagues across the state. If you have this information, please feel free to send it along, but until then...