The second of three things that seem to become less significant in today's NFL is home field advantage in the post season. Everyone wants it. It is still an advantage. And certainly your fans want to be able to go to your playoff games. Still, there has been a noticeable trend of road teams being much more successful in the playoffs than ever before.
We've already seen that the Bye Week doesn't translate into Super Bowl wins the way that it used to - eight Super Bowl titles from 1993 to 2002 against just four Super Bowl wins from 2003 to 2012. The advantage of home field appears to have been substantially more important going back.
Here are some numbers for you. From 1993 to 2002, home teams were a combined 75-25 in the post season! The worst record for home teams in a year was 6-4. In five of those years, home teams went 8-2. This .750 winning percentage is the equivalent of a 12-4 record.
Compare that to the numbers from the past ten years. From 2003 to 2012, home teams were a combined 58-42! The worst record for home teams in a year was 3-7. Home teams finished below .500 in the playoffs twice. They finished 5-5 in two consecutive years . And they finished with a combined 8-2 record just twice in those ten years. (And so far, home teams are 1-3 in this year's post season!) This winning percentage of .580 is almost the equivalent of a 9-7 record.
What if we go back further though. What about the ten seasons before 1993? Of course, the playoffs of the '80s were a bit different. There were fewer games each year with only one wild card game per conference. The two and three seeds were scheduled to play in the Divisional Round while the one seed was supposed to play the wild card winner - provided the wild card winner wasn't from their division (divisional rivals were not allowed to meet in the Divisional Round). The change to the format that we currently know (two wild card weekend games, one and two seeds get byes with the one seed playing the lowest remaining seed) occurred for the 1990 season. Still, we can find the total winning percentage just the same. Home teams in the playoffs from 1983 to 1992 were a combined 59-27. This .686 winning percentage is almost the equivalent of a 10-6 season. Only once did home teams finish at .500 (1992 saw a 5-5 record from home teams). The two years before that both saw home teams go 8-2. Thus, never from 1983 to 2002 have playoff teams gone worse than .500. It's happened twice in the past ten years.
In fact, going back to the very beginning you can see a much different home field advantage. If you go back to the very beginning of the Super Bowl era, home teams from 1966 to 1982 were 63-36. Of course, the playoffs had changed dramatically in this 17 year period of time. For the first couple of Super Bowls, the playoffs were literally just the top two teams in each conference playing each other. Winner went to the Super Bowl. So there were really only two playoff games prior to the championship.
What does this mean, exactly? The winning percentages of teams spiked in the '90s. It is perhaps arguable that the best teams of the '90s dominated the league in a way that no other time period saw. It's been fairly consistent before that though, hovering in the mid .600s winning percentage. The total combined record for home teams in the Super Bowl era - prior to this past decade of NFL seasons - 197-88. That's a .691 winning percentage! Compare that to the modern NFL's 58-42 record and .580 winning percentage.
There are a number of reasons home field advantage doesn't have the same luster it once did. The league has done more to provide an environment of parody and competitive equality than before. Things like the salary cap and draft order help to create an NFL in which it truly is possible for any team to beat any other team on any given Sunday - even if it were unlikely. Still, it's not like the NFL was bad in the '90s and there were only five or six teams that were good. At the end of the day though, home field advantage doesn't mean as much as it used to.
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