I’m going to make this short and sweet. I recently saw an article that I can no longer find about how the Vikings’ new U.S. Bank Stadium is now the loudest in the NFL due to how it’s constructed and how sound bounces around it or something. I’m taking a very scientific approach here, if you couldn’t tell. Just Google it or something if you really want, but the article made me think about home-field advantage and what causes NFL teams to win more at home. Is it the crowd noise? A lack of travel? Getting more calls?
I’ve always thought that crowd noise could be more important than people think just because teams have trouble communicating with one another in very loud environments. This is evidenced in part by road teams having the most false starts at CenturyLink Field, which is widely considered to be either the loudest or second-loudest stadium in the league. Even outside of the penalties, though, it makes sense that players not being able to communicate audibly — on both offense and defense — could have a big impact on their efficiency; it affects things like audibles, defensive checks, and just general communication among teammates.
I wanted to just take a look at the relationship between crowd noise and team success, but one problem is there’s not a great source for stadium loudness for all NFL teams, at least not one I could find. Ideally we’d be able to look at the correlation between decibels and, say, false starts or team win rates or whatever, but all I was able to find was information on the top 10 loudest stadiums in the league (by decibels).
I looked at the success of those teams versus the rest of the NFL. Below, you can see the home and away win percentages since 2012 for the top-two and top-10 loudest stadiums compared to the rest of the league. The top 10 are ranked as follows: CenturyLink, Arrowhead, RCA Dome, Superdome, Metrodome (formerly), Gillette, Lambeau, AT&T, Mile High, and FedEx. The idea was to compare home and away win rates to establish a baseline, then see which teams suffer most on the road versus at home.
The results are pretty interesting, with Seattle and Kansas City winning 73.6 percent of their home games and 52.1 percent on the road — a difference of 21.5 percentage points. The teams in the top-10 loudest stadiums overall won 69.3 percent of home games and 51.5 percent of road games — a difference of 17.8 percentage points. The rest of the league won only 51.6 percent of home games and 39.0 percent of away contests — a much smaller difference of 12.6 percentage points.
Another way to view it is like this: The teams in the top-two loudest stadiums have been 1.85 times as likely to win at home as on the road, compared to a factor of 1.55x for teams in the top-10 loudest stadiums and just 1.27x for the rest of the league. That seems fairly extreme.
So is there something ‘real’ here? I think so, but it’s worth noting there could be other factors at play. One is that certain stadiums/fans are of course louder in general, but could also become loud as the result of winning a game, i.e. loudness leads to winning, but winning also leads to loudness maybe just as much. Another possible explanation is that the crowd is important in helping a home team get calls; I doubt most refs really love getting booed out of the stadium.
Still, I do believe crowd noise — whether directly or indirectly — likely affects a team’s success rate more so than for what it’s given credit and could be used as one piece of evidence for or against a team performing at a certain level on the road once they leave that beneficial environment.
