The analysis considered two main factors:

1. Whether the game was played at home (“h”) or away (“a”).

2. The margin of victory (or defeat).

The regression model showed that, on average, playing at home provided a 10.65-point advantage over playing on the road. This effect was statistically significant, with a p-value of 0.0005. Basically, 0.0005 means that location of the game definitely had an impact on the margin of the victory.

We even get a cool equation out of it, where ‘mv’ is margin of victory and ‘ha’ is home or away. We set h to 1 and a to 0.

mv = -7.549 +10.653 x ha

This equation tells us that OSU is expected to lose by 7.55 points in away games (almost exactly a touchdown).

However, by playing at home, we add 10.653 points to OSU’s expected margin of victory. Here, that is equivalent to a touchdown and a field goal.

But what is the range of this? Is it always like this?

This is an estimate, so to really describe the advantage I made a confidence interval. Based on our regression, we are 95% confident that OSU’s home field advantage is between 4.69 and 16.62 points.