This isn’t anything worth reading right now, or even writing for that matter. But there’s probably something to be said for learning what it’s like to have to go through the duties of one’s own life while something goes on one can’t ignore. Performing the duties doesn’t require ignoring the unignorable. The unignorable remains in full view, while the duties are done around it.
For so many people, the unignorable, every day, is survival, or fear, or grief, or one of so many of the other emotions I would imagine come from persecution. Even right now, I would imagine those feelings are heightened—that these unignorables, for many, have grown in proportion with the new-yet-familiar unignorable that has entered the lives of so many of the rest of us. And that’s without a pandemic in the background, still claiming hundreds of American lives every day.
So, with the unignorable in full view, a brief note on what feels like the most unimportant of topics: calculating out home-field advantage.
Assuming sports come back with at least some restrictions and alterations, home-field advantage is not going to look the way we’re accustomed to it looking, which means for the first time, in many cases, we’ll be able to isolate the variables that make up home-field advantage. Here are three—and let’s be clear in saying that this list is not exhaustive.
The Crowd
This one can already be measured to a certain extent, by comparing attendance numbers and results within a sport’s own seasons (we’re aiming to do that at The Barking Crow in the coming weeks). Still, there are lurking variables in doing the study that way: rest, leverage, etc. With no attendance over an adequate sample (which may be hundreds of games in certain sports), those lurking variables will be washed away, ironing themselves out over time. The true home-field advantage, independent of crowds, will remain, allowing us to compare it to the normal home-field advantage to learn what portion of the advantage comes specifically from the crowd.
Travel Fatigue
In sports where teams don’t play series against one another—at least in the regular season—rest and travel fatigue are, presumably, a significant part of home-field advantage that cannot be easily adjusted for in measuring. In an environment like those proposed by the NBA and NHL, travel fatigue will be gone, leaving it easier to measure the impact of rest as well as the impact, again, of everything but rest, taken as a whole.
Living at Home
This is a somewhat abstract one, as far as these go, but the idea here is that the comfort of one’s home—the literal, personal home—could contribute to better performance, though the responsibilities associated with that home (children, specifically) could conceivably cause some degree poorer of performance. If the NBA does play at Disney, we’re likely to have one NBA team and one or two NHL teams still living at their in-season homes, again giving a possible opportunity to measure the impact of this specific aspect of home-field advantage (or, conceivably, disadvantage).
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Of course, the sample might end up being too small, but it’s unlikely we’ll learn nothing, and it’s possible we’ll learn a lot. Getting more grim, with the possibility present that reduced crowds and altered travel will continue to be necessary for more than just the next eight or ten months, we could get more data than we’re currently bargaining for, and it could come in the form of a lot of different trials, depending how many stages there are to what could become a multi-year process of returning to normalcy.
Again, this is a small matter relative to the unignorable. Infinitesimally small. But if you’re interested in modeling sporting events, you might find it ok to think on this for some moments, even while keeping the unignorable in full view.
