By seating capacity, eight of the biggest 10 stadiums in the world are American college football stadiums, and five of those are SEC stadiums. Go down the list on WorldAtlas a bit more, and SEC stadiums are six of the world’s biggest 14 and nine of the top 22.
So when it’s said that winning on the road in the SEC is hard, that’s not just bluster.
There was no better example of that than Saturday when three College Football Playoff contenders suffered upsets at Florida (18th-largest stadium in the world), Auburn (19th) and Oklahoma (22nd). Two of those games were at night, as was Tennessee’s loss the previous weekend at Georgia (world’s 14th-largest stadium).
Home-field advantage matters. We all knew that.
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But the data backs up that it especially matters in the SEC, especially in night games and especially later in the season:
November reign (for home teams)
For most of this season, road teams held their own in SEC games: The home team was 23-24 against power-conference teams entering this month, with the visiting teams outscoring the home team by 121 combined points.
That’s skewed a bit by SEC teams getting big road wins: Alabama by 32 points at Wisconsin and Ole Miss by 34 at Wake Forest, for instance. But an SEC team took a home drubbing — Florida by 24 to Miami — and generally, there was evidence in both directions.
Then November came around: SEC home teams are 13-5, including 11-3 during the past three weeks. It’s a trend that’s separate from other conferences, using only power-conference games, per TruMedia:
• SEC home teams have a .700 winning percentage this month, versus .625 for ACC home teams, .560 for the Big 12 and .517 for the Big Ten.
• Overall this season, SEC teams have a .571 home winning percentage, and the Big Ten is at .556, the Big 12 is .543 and the ACC is .507.
• Last year, SEC home teams had a .574 winning percentage, second best behind only the ACC. For just November last season, SEC home teams had a .522 winning percentage against power-conference teams, also second best to the ACC.
Both favorites and underdogs are doing better at home this month: SEC home underdogs are 7-5 (straight up, not just covering the spread) in November, compared with 8-12 straight up from August to October, per TruMedia.
What’s the reason behind the trend? Maybe as the season goes on and injuries pile up, the home-field advantage becomes more pronounced. It also could be affected by another dynamic:
Night games
This is a dynamic we wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and the past two weeks have only accentuated it. SEC home teams are 16-8 in games that kick off after 6 p.m. ET this year and 14-7 in SEC games. (Texas A&M’s loss to Notre Dame in September is the nonconference exception.) Home teams are 20-19 in SEC vs. SEC games this season that started before 6 p.m.
Meanwhile, almost half of the SEC vs. SEC night games have been this month: 10 out of the 21 this season. That’s a much higher rate than the first three months when only 35 percent of SEC vs. SEC games were in prime time.
It’s a change from past years, a direct result of the new TV contract: CBS used to pick the best game for its 3:30 p.m. ET slot. ABC and ESPN now get to pick all games and spread them out, and they have been putting more in prime time.
Someone pointed out to Kirby Smart that the seven SEC ranked teams had a 13-12 record in road games this year, and Smart cited the TV contract as a possible reason.
“It’s hard to play on the road in the SEC. Now maybe more of them are happening at night because of the television contract,” said Smart, whose team is 2-2 in road games this year with one of the losses at night. “It’s not any harder this year than it was last year. It’s just hard. And so maybe it’s showing up more.”
An in-game dynamic
An old axiom about playing on the road is it’s important to score early, take control and keep the crowd out of the game. This year the data bears that out.
SEC home teams have had the lead in 45 games this year (again, only involving power-conference opponents). The home team has ended up winning 78 percent of those games. The November effect here has been very real: The home teams have won 14 of the 15 games this month they led, including all eight when they led at halftime, per TruMedia.
What it means for the CFP
This is the year of no great teams. For the first time since 2017, no team in the SEC will have an unbeaten regular season, and there is only one one-loss team: Texas, which suffered its loss at home. (Georgia went ahead early and held on.)
But as the season has gone on, the losses by contenders have piled up, and as the CFP selection committee tries to work through the data, here could be the way to look at it: The ability to win on the road is the great separator.
• Texas, for all its lack of ranked wins, won at Vanderbilt. Alabama did not.
• Georgia lost twice on the road. But it won twice on the road, including against Texas.
• Tennessee, which is 1-2 on the road, will need to win Saturday at Vanderbilt to finalize its argument for a bid.
• Alabama will be perfect at home if it beats Auburn on Saturday, but it went 1-3 in SEC road games.
• Missouri, a preseason contender, has been perfect at home but 1-3 in SEC road games, including two routs by 30-plus points. That’s why the Tigers aren’t even on the radar anymore.
At the same time, teams not defending their home turf is a serious blot on their resume:
• Ole Miss is on the outside of the Playoff field because it lost two road games and because it lost at home to Kentucky.
• Texas A&M needs to beat Texas on Saturday to reach the SEC Championship Game and keep its CFP hopes alive. Even then, a win in Atlanta might be necessary thanks to that season-opening loss to Notre Dame, which came in College Station.
And yes, that’s Kyle Field, the sixth-largest stadium in the world and the largest in the SEC. It’s not impossible to win there as Notre Dame showed and Texas hopes to show. But it is hard to win there and throughout the SEC as the data shows. One hundred thousand people rooting against you will do that.
(Top photo of Mykel Williams: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
