Home Field Advantage: NFL Scoring Distribution Analysis

Using historical regular season data, I evaluated scoring trends in the NFL. Specifically, I compared scoring trends of the away team to scoring trends of the home team.

From 2015–2019, the home team won 56.3% of regular season games. Here’s the frequency distributions of each final score:

Over/under bettors are typically interested in the cumulative distribution of scores. Using the figure below, we can estimate the probability that a team will score less than a certain number of points in a game.

Here’s the same cumulative distributions combined into a single figure:

Have scoring trends evolved over time? The 2019 season featured the smallest gap between away and home scoring in recent memory. I plotted the mean and median scores for each team from 2012 through 2019 below: