Read the debate intro and Loyal Homer’s argument that regular season college football should not be played on a neutral site.
Home field advantage has VERY LITTLE to do with the geographic location of where the game is played. Unless we are talking about a baseball game (where the dimensions of the fields can differ), or we are talking about a drastic change in climate (i.e. warm weather teams playing in cold weather), the physical address of the stadium is completely irrelevant to the game itself.
In MOST cases, home field advantage refers strictly to the ability for a team to play in front of their fans, as opposed to the fans of their opponent.
How, then, could it be a bad thing for games such as Rice vs. Texas, or Toledo vs. Ohio State, to be played at a location other than the on-campus stadiums? As long as the “home” school has access to the majority of the tickets, it will remain a home game for them.
There is a difference between a game played on a neutral site and a game simply played at a different home field than normal. Most bowl games are played on neutral ground, where neither team has the advantage of crowd majority. For the Rice vs. Texas/Toledo vs. Ohio State games they are not classified as “neutral games.” For the Rice Owls, Reliant Stadium in Houston will be considered, for all intents and purposes, Rice Stadium for their game against the Texas Longhorns. Rice is considered the home team for that game, and the tickets available to Rice students and fans will proportionally match that fact. Likewise, the Toledo Rockets are labeled as the home team against Ohio State.
As Sports Geek mentioned during the intro, this is a very profitable endeavor for the “smaller” schools such as Rice or Toledo. The University of Toledo, in 2008, generated $4.4M in revenue for the entire football season. Toledo, which normally plays their home games at the Glass Bowl (seating capacity of 26,000), will be calling Cleveland Browns Stadium (seating capacity of more than 73,000) home for their game against the Buckeyes. Since this is classified as a home game for Toledo, the school received 58,000 tickets to be sold for the game, an amount that equals to more than double the stadium capacity for a game in Toledo. As a result, the Rockets have an opportunity to earn somewhere between $4M and $5M from this single game. I would call that a win for Toledo!
There are additional reasons beyond the obvious financial benefits which also indicate the fact that this helps, rather than hurts, the game of college football.
The first of those reasons is to consider the likelihood of the smaller school defeating the larger school. During the past four seasons, Texas has outscored Rice by a combined 172 points (an average of 43 points per game). Does it REALLY matter whether the game is played in Reliant Stadium, Rice Stadium, or in Moscow? Most likely, Texas is going to dominate that game no matter where it is played. Home field advantage is almost non-existent. If Rice has to get blown out by Texas, why can’t they at least make a lot of money in the process? It is better for the school, which will lose the game anyway, to at least boost their ticket sales and their home-game attendance statistics.
Another factor to consider is that the increased quantity of tickets available for that smaller school can actually BOOST the home field advantage for the smaller school. Toledo has every opportunity to put 58,000 of their fans in the stadium against Ohio State, a far better opportunity to leverage home field advantage than only playing in front of 26,000 fans. If a team like Rice or Toledo are going to pull off the David vs. Goliath upset, they will need as much support as possible from a large fan base. Those schools will want as many screaming, yelling, rabid fans in the stadium as the fire marshal will allow. The bigger the venue, the more fans you can accommodate.
Playing these games at a nearby, much larger stadium gives the smaller schools an opportunity to attract big-name competition and play in a stadium which accommodates MANY more of their fans – earning millions of extra dollars in the process. The result is a win-win opportunity for all schools involved (unless, of course, David DOES miraculously slay Goliath).
