Determining College Football’s True Road Field Advantage:

After revealing my annual True Home Field Advantage Ratings in college football, I now move on to analyzing the road performance levels of teams.

Reiterating what I stated earlier this week regarding the importance of understanding how to assign home & road field points in football, anyone who is still assigning the base 3 to 3.5 points for home field for every game is making a gargantuan mistake. This not only leads to errors in handicapping individual games on any given week, but it also compounds itself in the building of team power ratings which take into account schedule strength and where a team has played its games. Because of this risk, my own experience on both sides of the counter has led me to build and maintain team specific home and road field ratings. These are built into the formulas I use to calculate the Power, Effective Strength, and Bettors Ratings in PSW and on VSiN.com.

 

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I explained the many reasons why certain teams have more definitive home-field advantage than others. The same can be said for teams’ performances levels on the road. In my opinion, coaching/preparation level is the leading factor for teams who play best on the road. These teams typically have solid defenses and reliable quarterback play. The other factor that might not be as clearly defined, I feel that a lot of teams that don’t enjoy a massive home-field edge in atmosphere have a tendency to play better on the road as their performance level is more consistent across the board, and not as influenced by game location. Perhaps having more veteran leadership on a team always plays an important role.

To determine which teams hold the best true road field performance levels in college football, I have taken the teams’ logs in true road game since the start of the 2021 season, or essentially the last 3-1/2 seasons. I compared their own average power rating in those games to their opponents’ average power rating, using my actual logged numbers during that span for every game. This margin would be considered the amount they should have won or lost by when meeting on a neutral field, or the expected margin. I then compared this amount to the actual point differential that the team accumulated in those games. Obviously, the teams that had a greater actual differential than expected differential played the “best” on the road. For college teams, the margins went as high as +4.5 for Bowling Green out of the MAC to -10.6 for Temple of the AAC.

No one would ever assign a road field “edge” of 4.5 points to Bowling Green, as that would outweigh any opponents actual home field points. However, it does lend a lot of value to betting the Falcons on the road and in theory, bettors should discount the opponents home-field points when they are facing head coach Scott Loeffler’s team. For the record, BGSU closes its road schedule for the season on Saturday at Ball State. Regarding Temple, with a -10.6 true road field (TRF) rating to go along with a 1-20 SU & 5-16 ATS record, at this point you’d have to be a true gambler to back the Owls any time they hit the road.

The numbers I showed earlier in the week suggest the actual true home-field advantage in college football has been about 2.5 points. As I indicated then, the home-field advantage does seem to be trending back upward since it bottomed out in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic and empty stadiums. If you’re using numbers larger or smaller than these, they are probably impacting your betting results negatively as you’re not getting a true gauge for what it means to play games at home or away.

One important thing to note: I don’t specifically assign the road field ratings in accordance with the order of the True Road Performance numbers you’ll see below on the charts, as I also give strong consideration to the straight-up and ATS records. Otherwise, single games where a team won or lost big can falsely impact the overall ratings. That said, with all factors considered, Michigan and Notre Dame are my actual top road-rated teams for college football, and I deduct 0.8 points or more of the opponents’ home field edge when they are hosting these teams.

Keep in mind that as you interpret the results, as I noted last week in the home study. I have removed the two best and worst point spread losses for every team during the 3-1/2 year span from the calculations. These results are still noted in the SU and ATS records, but they didn’t factor into the formulas or point/line averages.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the other highlights I have found from my college and pro football road field performance study.

College Football Home Field Advantage Study Highlights

  • Collectively, the conferences with the best overall TRUE road field performance rating are the Big Ten at -1.5 & MAC, at -1.7. Furthermore, five of the top 10 individual teams in terms of the True Road Performance ratings are from those leagues.
  • Two conferences have collective True Road Performance ratings of less than -2.8 points. They are the Sun Belt (-2.9), and American (-2.8). Interestingly, these are Group of 5 leagues, and last year, when I conducted this study, the three worst conferences were Power 5.
  • There are three teams that have lost fewer than five true road games over the last 3-1/2 seasons, and they are Georgia, Ohio State & Michigan. The Wolverines end the season on the road at Ohio State. James Madison, Oregon, and Notre Dame have also played very well on the road lately, winning at least 75% of their contests.
  • The worst outright record for any college football team on the road since the start of the 2020 season belongs to Temple, at 1-20. Akron is next at 2-24, while UMass, ULM, and Louisiana Tech also sport just 2-win records. Temple plays at UTSA on Friday night, and all of the others besides Akron are playing Saturday road tilts.
  • Three teams have compiled ATS records better than 75% in college football on the road since the start of the 2021 season. They are Arkansas (11-3 ATS), UNLV (17-5 ATS), and Notre Dame (12-4 ATS). Six others are over 70%, including Power 5 teams Michigan, Penn State, and Illinois. Of note, the Illini play their final two games of the season on the road, starting Saturday at Rutgers.
  • Four college football teams have been under 33% ATS over the last 3-1/2 seasons on the road. They are Temple (5-16 ATS), Texas A&M (4-9 ATS), USC (6-13 ATS), and Washington (6-13 ATS). I already mentioned Temple’s road game at UTSA on Friday, but all three other teams are on the road either this week or next to take advantage of.
  • The four teams that have played to the average biggest point spreads on the road in recent seasons are no surprise, as they have dominated college football this year or in recent seasons. That list is topped by Georgia (-20.1), Ohio State (-18.4), Alabama (-14.6), and Oregon (-13.9).
  • Two teams have been worse than 22-point underdogs on average in road games in recent seasons of college football and they are UMass (+22.3) and Akron (+22.5)
  • Four college football teams have averaged more than 33.5 PPG in their road games over the last 3-1/2 seasons. They are:

Oregon – 37.4 PPG
Notre Dame – 34.8
Georgia – 33.8
Jacksonville State – 33.5

  • Four teams in college football have allowed fewer than 18 PPG in road games since the start of the 2021 season. That list includes:

Michigan – 15.7 PPG
Georgia – 16.8
Penn State – 17.7
Ohio State – 17.9

  • The only three teams that have outscored opponents by 16.5 PPG or more on the road since 2021 are Michigan (+17.3 PPG), Georgia (+17.0), and Oregon (+16.5). No other team has a road point differential of more than 14.8 PPG in that same span.
  • Using my formula comparing how much teams have won on the road as compared to how much they were supposed to win by based upon average power ratings, the top teams for true road performance in college football over the last 3-1/2 seasons have been:
  • Bowling Green +4.5
  • Illinois +3.8
  • Navy +3.3
  • Michigan +3.1
  • Penn State +3.0

Four of these teams are new to the list in 2024. Of those five teams, all besides Michigan are on the road this weekend!

  • The teams with the worst true road performance ratings in all of college football based upon their road statistics over the last 3-1/2 seasons have been:
  • Temple -10.6
  • Florida Atlantic -6.9
  • Alabama -6.8
  • Fla International -6.8
  • Hawaii -6.5

When you think of a team like Alabama being on this list, you need to consider that the expectations are quite high for the Tide in every game, and oddsmakers usually shade lines toward them. So, despite outscoring teams by 9.2 PPG, they are still falling well short of expectations. Concerning the games for this weekend, Temple is at UTSA and Alabama plays at Oklahoma.

You will find the entire list of all 134 FBS teams and their road performance on the chart here. They are sorted in order of true road performance rating.

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Steve Makinen
Steve Makinen
As one of the original founders of StatFox, Steve Makinen has been in the business of sports betting and data analysis for almost 25 years now. In his time in the industry, Steve has worked in a variety of capacities on both sides of the betting counter, from his early days of developing the StatFox business, to almost a decade of oddsmaking consulting for one of the world's leading sportsbooks, to his last seven years as Point Spread Weekly and Analytics Director with VSiN. Steve has always believed that number crunching and handicapping through foundational trends and systems is the secret to success and he shares this data with VSiN readers on a daily basis for all of the major sports.

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