Some teams have more of an advantage at home than others. That’s because of a number of different factors, including the level of support a team gets. A team like Nebraska or Florida State, which sells out every game, has a much stronger home field advantage than teams like Memphis and SMU, where crowds of 30,000 would be considered very large. Weather can be a factor too. In Miami's heyday, they were able to take advantage of the heat and humidity in South Florida as other teams wilted in the late going, not used to playing hard for that long in sweltering heat wearing football pads. That’s a lot to overcome when the other team keeps coming at you.

For years, Hawaii was a good proposition at home, especially as an underdog. One of the reasons was obviously the toll traveling took on the opponent. Even teams on the West Coast had to cross a couple of time zones to get to Honolulu, and that can have its effect when you are only getting in a day or two ahead of time. Also, if you’ve ever been to Hawaii, you know that concentrating on playing a football game is rather difficult once you get there. Of course, the oddsmaker has adjusted over the years and some horrific Hawaii teams have not been able to take advantage of their home dog situations.

Loud home crowds can make things difficult on the opposing team, especially when you have a quarterback who is trying to make himself heard at the line of scrimmage calling out signals and making audibles. This problem becomes magnified when the game is played indoors. And some college teams are known to have louder, more vociferous followings than others.

Georgia and Florida are loud places. So is Clemson. Syracuse can be, in the Carrier Dome. Miami’s crowd is a little more reserved. There is a difference, especially when the “momentum” starts to shift.

One major paradox surrounds Louisiana State. People always point out that Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge is an awfully difficult place to play, particularly at night, and that the crowd is so loud it intimidates the opposition. This is legend in college football circles. Yet LSU has never really been a great proposition as a home team. Perhaps LSU’s sub-standard record against the number can be partially explained by saying that the oddsmaker perhaps credits LSU a little TOO much for their home field, anticipating that public perception will move in that direction. But the reputation, by and large, is a myth.

Straight-up records certainly should be taken into account when calculating a team’s home field advantage. After all, if a stadium is tough to win at, then it’s tough to win at, period. But the pointspread record of teams on their home field have to be taken strongly into consideration, as this is the barometer by which they perform in relation to expectation. LSU under-achieves at home, while other squads may over-achieve, and thus, those teams have more of a REAL home field edge.

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