Home-field advantage numbers are similar to the travels required to attend bowl season.
Plenty of folks prefer flying on Southwest, which is consistently on time and offers routes that aren't generally available elsewhere. Meanwhile, United serves full meals in their terminal clubs in between hops from Houston, Denver and Chicago. While there are no major complaints about those brands, American Airlines has always felt comfortable to me.
American always upgrades my seat, places a bright priority sticker on my baggage and consistently rewards my family with triple miles. No matter if the hop happens in Dallas, Chicago or Los Angeles, I could blindly walk to an Admirals Club and know the wifi password.
My travels with American are similar to a quote from the Wizard of Odds: "There's no place like home."
Speaking of home, LSU has returned to the top spot in terms of home-field advantage in college football.
With the capacity to hold over 100,000 people, opposing fans are intimidated by a raucous crowd from Championship Plaza to the recent south end zone expansion.
There are many different factors to determine home-field advantage, from stadium capacity to straight-up records. At Action Network, we base home-field advantage on one metric: Does a team cover the closing number from oddsmakers?
While most outlets assume 2.5 points for the home team, our calculations use a tangent to determine the final numbers. Based on against-the-spread numbers from a three- and 10-year sample, a Taylor series is used to deviate from the standard home-field advantage.
The 10-year sample accounts for 80% of the deviation from 2.5 points, while the remaining 20% consists of the previous three years.
While head coaches and recruiting classes come and go, this formula provides approximately 60 data points over a decade to determine home-field advantage.
With LSU taking over the top spot, here's the full list of college football home-field advantages that will be used to build win totals in 2024.
