Home Field Advantage: Fact or Fiction?

Research Question: Does the University of Utah football team win

more games at home than they do at their away games? (Does the
home advantage that everyone talks about really come into play?)
H0 : The proportion of wins by the University of Abstract: Many people believe in a home court Results: The observed difference of wins was 0.085.
Utah at home is the same as the proportion of wins advantage, but there has yet to be any The data is not strongly skewed and is overall
away. home = away significance evidence to support it. We are symmetric. It does not show any extreme
looking at University of Utah football games
outliers. A p-value of 0.4503 was obtained along
Ha : The proportion of the University of Utah from 2012 to 2017 (2017 season isnt complete)
with a confidence interval of (-0.1473, 0.2993).
winning games at home is greater than the and running statistical analysis to see if there is
proportion of wins when playing away from home. any statistical evidence that there is a home We obtained a mean of 0.004 and standard
home > away court advantage. In a 5 football season period, deviation of 0.117 on the null distribution.
the University of Utah played a total of 75
games. 39 of those games were at home and 36
were away.

Methodology: We took a simple random

sample is by putting all of the home wins
and losses from 2012 to 2017 in one group.
Then once they are in a group, number them
1 through how many games we chose to
represent in the 5 seasons. (Ex. if we chose
24 games through 3 seasons number them 1-
24). Then we got online and found a number
generator and selected a set of at least 20 Conclusion: The p-value of 0.4503 doesnt give any
numbers for the home games. From here on sufficient evidence against the null hypothesis,
out we created the same process for the which reveals that there is likely no correlation
away games and place those numbers in a between home field advantage and wins. We are
random generator as well. Once we have at 95% confident that the probability of the Utes
least 20 games from each home side and winning a home game is between -0.1359 and
0.3069 more likely than winning an away game.
away side that have been randomly selected
we will then compare those results. (Ran
data on the Multiple Proportion Applet.)

References: Utah Utes Football Schedules. (2017). Retrieved

December 05, 2017, from http://www.fbschedules.com/ncaa/pac-
Angelica Madsen, Kathren Ashton, Allison Lloyd, Rebecca Madsen 10/utah-utes.php