AROUND THE IVIES: Home Is Where The Football Field Is

There’s no place like home.

That’s the old expression. For us college kids it’s because home is where laundry doesn’t pile up in a stinky pile in the corner, where the refrigerator remains miraculously stocked with tasty treats, where the slight dip in the couch bears a remarkable resemblance to the shape of our buttocks, and where we can fart with impunity.

For Dorothy, it was because going on the (yellow brick) road to Oz turned out to be a journey of shattered dreams and unfulfilled expectations, despite the accommodating Lions.

In football, it’s because home is an advantage. Home is where the 12th man lives, five or six Saturdays and eight Sundays a year. Visitors are greeted rudely and noisily. The crowd applauds when you drop a pass or get helmeted in the ribs. It starts yelling whenever the guest tries to speak and the officials are sometimes swayed in favor of the hosts by the beseeching masses.

Just remember the game-changing unsportsmanlike call against Danny Tanner at Princeton two weeks ago for a perfect example of that.

The discomfort is enough to make 300-pound linemen wish for a pair of ruby slippers, too.

Ancient Eight teams are a combined 19-11 as hosts this season. Harvard and Princeton, unsurprisingly, lead the way with 3-0 marks. Yale and Cornell also boast three home wins, against only one loss apiece. Dartmouth is the only squad with a losing record, in fact winless at Memorial Field in four games. Penn is second worst at 2-2, although one of its losses was against crosstown rival Villanova, whose partisans likely made up half of the attending crowd.

In conference play, home-field advantage has proved slightly less crucial. The cumulative intra-league record is 9-7, although the majority of the important decisions have gone to the locals: Princeton over Harvard, Cornell over Princeton, Yale over Penn.

That figure belies the common wisdom that, given the advantage from the crowd and not having to travel and being familiar with the confines, the home team usually wins. The rule of thumb in betting football is that home field is worth three points; a game with a three-point home favorite would be a coin flip on neutral turf.

But recent Ivy League history, probably due to the wide gulf between the good teams and the bad ones—I’m not naming names, ahem, Columbia, ahem, Dartmouth—refutes that. Last year, home teams were an even 14-14. The year before, a more robust 18-10. In