Home field advantage is the ‘holy grail’ of sports.  In general, teams play better and win more often on their home field than they do on the road.  But how does this impact sports betting in general and NFL handicapping in particular?

I’ll let you in on a handicapping secret—with the exception of baseball, there’s no other major US sport where home field matters less than it does in NFL football.  This isn’t to say that on balance NFL teams don’t win more at home than they do on the road; instead it means that for handicapping purposes home field is less significant than the mainstream sports media would have you believe.

The ‘standard’ home field advantage afforded NFL teams by linesmakers is 3.5 points.  So in a matchup between two otherwise equal pro football teams, the home team will usually be a -3’ point favorite.    While the true significance of home field advantage varies from team to team in the NFL, the pointspread implications of that advantage are far more standardized than any other sport.

I’ve been handicapping the NFL for over twenty years on a professional basis and can count the losing seasons I’ve had on one hand with fingers left over.  My statistical and objective analysis of NFL football games has never once considered which team was playing at home and which team was playing on the road as part of the equation.

Where a team plays its games from week to week does have some significance, but not due to some intrinsic ‘advantage’ for playing at home.  Here are some considerations:

Surface: Some handicappers make a big deal about whether a team is playing on natural grass or artificial turf, but the advantage or disadvantage that some teams have on certain surfaces is more pronounced in college than in the NFL.  More recently, some serious handicappers have become groundskeeping experts and track performance on the various types of artificial turf such as ‘FieldTurf’ and ‘Sportex Momentum Turf’.  In theory, teams with greater team speed benefit from artificial turf and suffer on natural grass.

Travel: This is the greatest significance in my opinion to where an individual game is played on a given week.  It’s much easier for a team to focus on the task at hand when they do not have to worry about the logistics of travel.  Obviously this has nothing to do with the individual characteristics of a venue and everything to do with scheduling.

Individual team characteristics: Perhaps the most important concept to take away from this is to understand that individual teams react to the home/road dynamic in different ways in different seasons.  The reality, however, is that good teams can win on the road and bad teams can lose at home.  The teams that usually have a very pronounced home/road performance differential are teams trying to move into the ‘upper echelon’ of the league.  For example, in 2008 Arizona went 6-2 at home and 3-5 on the road.  Against the spread, however, they were 5-3 at home and 4-4 on the road.  In the long haul it all evens out and particularly from a pointspread standpoint.