Monday Night Football

RESEARCH QUESTION

Do NFL teams have a greater home field advantage on Monday night football games? Our goal is to answer this question by modeling the relationship between Monday night games starting in 1970 and numerous independent variables.

RESULTS

* Our model explains that a home team wins 62% on Monday night football games.

* A model will show that 61% of a time a team that won on a given Monday had a winning record (they made the playoffs).

* The data shows that on average a home team will either win by 7.9 points or lose by 4.3 points.

* The model does not do a good job of showing the relationship between where the games are played at as well as the weather associated with location.

DISCUSSION OF RESULTS

We followed a traditional model development process by specifying, formulating, and diagnosing five separate regression models. The models included five different dependent variables. Each were used to determine what the best fit for our data.

We used "home team wins" as our dependent variable because it gave us the highest R squared. The P-values were also low for this model, except for stadium attendance, which we found out according to the data, it has a very minimal influence on whether the home team wins or not.

Of the 316 times the home team won on Monday nights, 194 of the win were won by a team that whom made it to the playoffs that year. This accounts for 61% of the wins. Even though the home team made the playoffs 254 times, only 194 of those teams actually won the game. So the biggest factor was if the team with the winning record usually won.

ASSUMPTIONS

Our primary assumption is that home field advantage has large amount to determine the winning team. We originally believed there would be a large factor with the audience. Our decision is primary influenced by winning records.

LIMITATIONS

Despite the good overall explanatory power of the model and the presence of only significant independent variables, the model fails to provide results if the weather and location of game had an influence on what team won.

The most influential factor that the model valued to recognize was that of the crowd and location. It would be hard to measure the level the crowd had. May it be from noise level of pumping up the home team or listening to the announcer or even to the effects of the referees

The location plays a big factor as well. If you have a team that is used to playing at sea level and they come up to Denver, Colorado to play. There will be less air in Colorado and making it harder for teams that are not acclimated to preform.

INTRODUCTION

"Football?