There’s no place like home
Every team in the Pac-10 likes home cooking
By Malamute, 13 February 2002

Every team in the Pac-10 has a home-field advantage, some more than others. For each team in the Pac-10, we looked at its win percentages at home and on the road, then looked at the differences. The data may surprise you.

Crowd noise, road weariness, weather, close calls and field conditions are some of the factors that can benefit a home team. This is especially true at Washington, which has won 14-straight games at home, and at Oregon, which had won 23 straight games before losing to Stanford last year.

Before I gathered the data shown in the table below, I asked former UCLA quarterback Tom Ramsey (1979-1982) about some of the factors involved with having a home-field advantage. Ramsey (a football analyst for Fox Sports) responds to questions posed by fans on his message board (pacwestfootball.theinsiders.com).

He replied that there “are BIG advantages to playing on a strong home field, and yes, I do think calls (by the officials) are influenced sometimes by the surroundings.” 

He listed the toughest Pac-10 environments, which he said were at Washington, Washington State (when the game is meaningful and is sold out), and Oregon. “OSU has become tough because of the way the Beavers play…fast paced ball…Regarding your question on location of the big rivalry games, I don't believe it has that much to do with where you play, emotion runs high in all big games, and usually the better team wins, regardless.”

He mentioned that ASU was tough at one time, and needed to recapture it, as did Arizona, USC and UCLA.

Then added, “On a national scene, I played in the ‘big house’, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Buckeye Stadium - all very difficult environments to play (all wins by the way). The one stumbling block was Kinnick stadium at Iowa - Bobby Stoops and gang put it on us in '81 - heck, the fans were spitting on us, they were no more than 5' feet behind our bench…it was ridiculous.”

The data from Table 1 below support his notions. It covers a 12-year period, taken from 1990 to 2001, and  includes out-of-conference games, as well as games played in the conference.  Washington has the best home-field win percentage of any team in the Pac-10, followed by Oregon, UCLA and Arizona. However, the most significant column in the table, the last one, shows the difference between the team’s home-field win percentage and its win percentage on the road. In this case, Washington, Oregon and Oregon State all tie at 24%, which agree with what Ramsey said about them.

As an example, for Washington, the difference (.24) between its winning percentage at home and its winning percentage on the road is greater than USC's difference (.09). 

Table 2 shows the overall win percentage for teams in the Pac-10 for all games played for the period extending from 1990 to 2001.  It includes games played in the conference,  out-of-conference games and the bowl games. Washington, Oregon, UCLA and Arizona have the best records. 

Table 3 shows the win percentage for all games played over  the last five years. Oregon leads the conference due to its remarkable 23-game home winning streak that occurred during that period of time. Washington is next. In part, that is due to its current home winning streak of 14 games. Oregon State has moved from last place (Table 2) to fifth place (Table 3). In part, this is due to parity in the conference and the Beavers' home-field advantage. Partly due to parity and the lack of a significant home-field advantage, USC has tumbled from fifth to ninth place in the conference. 

In our next article, we will take a look at how the teams fair exclusively in the Pac-10 as they play against each other.

Table 2. Overall win percentage, 1990-2001, all games

Table 3. Overall win percentage, 1997-2001, all games