How might fan-less games impact the Vikings' strength of schedule?

Minnesota has dominated at US Bank Stadium but on the road...not as much

*Photo courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings

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No matter how you feel about sports coming back during the COVID-19 pandemic, one matter everyone seems to accept is that playing sports games with fans in the stands is a bad idea. Even if we go with the optimistic view that the NFL will start on time, odds of getting 65,000 people back in one place by September are pretty low.

We know it’s going to feel weird to watch games with nobody inside massive stadiums but one thing that will be difficult to pinpoint is the impact of empty venues on home field advantage.

There are conflicting ways of figuring the exact advantages of home field to begin with.

In 2018, FiveThirtyEight found that rushing the ball is more effective at home and hypothesized that the inability to hear the snap count for the road team would make a split-second difference in blocking. However, the gap in win probability added was not large enough to account for teams’ greater success at home.

NFL analyst Warren Sharp discovered that home field advantage has been on the decline over the last 20 years and dug into numerous explanations including an uptick in technology, better travel circumstances and more parity.

The book Scorecasting, written by L. Jon Wertheim and economist Tobias Moskowitz, dug into the home-field mystery and found it difficult to draw connections between many of the elements that we often attribute to winning on home turf. He used a basketball example to demonstrate players’ ability to perform in noisy conditions.

“With free throws it didn’t matter with time of game, it didn’t matter home, away, fourth quarter, first quarter, the idea that the guys waving the thunder sticks were distracting the free throw shooter — when a guy misses everybody thinks it’s them but if someone’s a 60% free throw shooter there’s only a 36% chance he makes both,” Wertheim said over the phone Saturday. “In football, how much do players really change the way they play?”

One area where there was clear impact across sports was refereeing.

“We found that the farther away fans were from the action, the less of an impact there was on officiating,” Wertheim said.

Wertheim points to a psychological effect of pressure from a packed stadium. Is it fear or need to please the mob? Hard to say exactly but since 2016, the average home team produced 207 penalties and away team 222. Put a different way: Over the last four seasons, road teams have lost 4,648 more yards to flags than home teams. And that’s even with a massive increase in pressure by the NFL and fans to get calls right.

“If you look at the 15 most impactful, controversial calls in games over the past few years I think you’d find that maybe 14 of the calls went for the home team,” director of data and analytics for the NFL Michael Lopez said in the FiveThirtyEight piece. “Using the ball-tracking data we have available, there are probably incremental ways we can help make official’s lives easier while increasing fairness in the game.”

Coaching decisions might be altered too.

“Challenges is another thing that comes to mind,” Wertheim said.

You can add clock management, play calling and in-game calls like deciding whether to go for it on fourth down or kick that are all plausibly hindered by a raucous crowd. Again, it is difficult to quantify.

Vikings center Garrett Bradbury said that football players do most of their work without noise so he doesn’t expect there to be a difference in performance.

“We only play in front of fans 16 times a year, every other time we play football there's no one in front of us, so from a crowd noise standpoint that wouldn't be a factor for away games, but I don't know how much it would change our job,” Bradbury said. “Every day we practice without noise so we're just going to go out and if that's the case then that's the way we're going to handle our business. It'll be different but obviously we'd love to play in front of Vikings fans on Sundays. That's definitely an advantage for us for home games, but for the safety of everyone if that's what needs to be done then that's what needs to be done. That's not my call. I'm just going to go out there and do my job regardless.”

One of the first leagues to open up since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis was Bundesliga soccer. In a recent column, Roger Gonzalez of CBS showed that the early results lean heavily toward home-field advantage disappearing. He wrote:

There is nothing like playing at home, especially when the stadium is filled with fans that provide that extra jolt of energy when you really need it. Fans add belief, passion and comfort for the home team and make it more challenging for the visitors -- at least they did.

Without fans in the Bundesliga during the coronavirus pandemic, the home-field advantage is gone, and the numbers show it. Out of 27 matches since the league came back May 17, only five teams have won at home. Officially, it's five wins, 10 draws and 12 losses. 

Minnesota will be one of the most interesting teams to study because the Vikings have been extremely successful at US Bank Stadium since its opening in 2016. They also have a tough road schedule that takes them to several famously difficult stadiums and matches them against all-time great quarterbacks.

So would empty stadiums make life more difficult on the Vikings? Could it have benefits? How can we figure out what to expect? One way to give us some indication is by looking at how differently they play at US Bank Stadium and away. Let’s have a look…

*All stats via Pro-Football Reference*

The U.S. Bank Stadium advantage

Home record: 24-9, +215 point differential

Away record: 17-17-1, +57 point differential

We should keep in mind that even four seasons’ worth of data is a small sample size but something unique about the Vikings is the consistency of their roster during this time. In the US Bank Stadium era, they saw very little turnover on the roster, especially on defense. Every player that started the Vikings’ playoff games on defense in 2019 was on the roster in 2016. And the two key stars on offense, Adam Thielen and Stefon Diggs, were standouts from the building’s opening night.

The quarterbacks have changed but the performance from that position has been fairly stable. From Sam Bradford to Case Keenum to Kirk Cousins, they all flourished at home while opposing quarterbacks found US Bank Stadium to be a house of horrors. In fact, opposing QBs threw more interceptions (33) than touchdowns (30) in the Vikings’ home palace.

QB performance (including playoffs):

It’s possible that the quality of QBs faced could be slightly different home vs. away — after all, they saw Matt Stafford in Detroit last year and David Blough at home. But even good QBs have been less than their usual dominant selves there. Aaron Rodgers has a 75.6 rating in four games, Matt Stafford isn’t far ahead at 84.1 and Drew Brees’s 94.0 rating in three games seems OK but not when you compare it to his overall 108.2 rating since 2016.

From an X’s and O’s standpoint, head coach Mike Zimmer might simply know the right buttons to push to use the crowd noise to his advantage. For example, when his team disguises a pass rush, the opposing offensive line needs to communicate and adapt. They can’t do so without hearing each other.

Here’s some notable defensive numbers home vs. away:

• 29.8% third down percentage at home (1st) vs. 37.5% away (4th)

• 104 sacks at home (1st) vs. 72 sacks (20th)

• 286.1 yards against per game at home (1st) vs. 335.3 away (6th)

If there are no fans in the stands offensive lines can hear calls from their teammates up front and QBs, it’s possible the Vikings’ opponents could have an edge, especially on third down where Zimmer loves to dial up blitzes.

Kirk Cousins’s splits

At US Bank Stadium: 24 touchdowns, seven interceptions, 7.7 YPA, 105.2 rating, 83.6 PFF grade

Away from US Bank Stadium: 32 touchdowns, nine interceptions, 7.4 YPA, 101.1 rating, 78.7 PFF grade

Even if you stretch the sample size out to Kirk Cousins’s entire career as a starter, the gap in his home vs. road splits is not large.

Neither the gap in PFF grade nor four points in QB rating or 0.3 yards per attempt is enough to draw the conclusion that he is decidedly better at home or that he will improve on the road with no fans jeering him.

With closer investigation we can find ancillary ways that Cousins could be affected like the time of game. He’s 35-20-1 when kickoff is at noon CT but 11-25-1 when his team starts at any other time. He has an 86.7 rating in 14 games starting at 3:25 CT and is 2-14 on Monday or Thursday. The problem with all of these splits is: If you’re playing the afternoon or night game, that usually means matching up with a good opponent and he didn’t always play for the most competitive teams in D.C.

If stadium availability is altered and teams need to play at unusual times, it’s worth wondering how he will respond but we can’t say with any degree of certainty that it will have a negative effect.

Visitors’ road performance

If home field advantage is indeed caused by the presence of fans, teams that are poor on the road might get a boost in a quiet US Bank Stadium. The Vikings are set to face a schedule of squads whose road performances since 2016 are less than inspiring. Only two teams they are set to face have positive point differentials on the road* over the last four seasons and division foe Chicago has been abysmal away from Soldier Field.

*Only 12 teams have positive point differentials on the road since 2016

Dallas: +56 (9th)

Atlanta: +53 (10th)

Tennessee: -31 (13th)

Detroit: -46 (14th)

Green Bay: -92 (16th)

Jacksonville: -125 (20th)

Carolina: -131 (21st)

Chicago: -133 (22nd)

Since the Vikings’ defense has been incredible at home, the biggest beneficiaries would be teams with explosive offenses. Last year Dallas had the second most passing yards in the NFL and Tennessee quarterback Ryan Tannehill led the NFL in rating. Plus, if you recall, Rodgers and Stafford sputtered inside US Bank Stadium. Chicago’s Nick Foles won at US Bank Stadium in the neutral atmosphere of the Super Bowl.

Road opponents with the biggest difference

If the Vikings lose some juice behind their defense at US Bank Stadium, they might be able to close the gap with their road schedule, which features four teams that have been far better at home than away.

Houston: +242

Chicago: +210

Green Bay: +203

Indianapolis: +157

Every Viking fan could have plucked out Soldier Field and Lambeau Field as the biggest opportunities for their squad to benefit from empty seats but Houston and Indianapolis come as a surprise.

Road opponents with the smallest difference

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the advantage of playing at the Superdome and CenturyLink Field — at least over the last four years — have been overstated.

Detroit: -4

New Orleans: -35

Tampa Bay: +45

Seattle: +70

These results speak to the challenge of pinpointing which stadiums cause the most problems for opponents but if you thought the Vikings could catch a break by playing on the road at Seattle without their faithful folks in the stands, that might not actually be the case.

Other considerations

— The Vikings will have a much younger defense this year with starting cornerbacks under the age of 24. Veterans would logically be more adept to adjusting to unique circumstances than inexperienced players.

— With Gary Kubiak taking over as offensive coordinator, the Vikings will have the same system as last year, helping them be more familiar with their jobs despite strange surroundings.

— We do not yet know what road travel might entail.

The bottom line: There are more questions than answers here but it makes sense to expect more challenges for the Vikings’ defense and a performance from Cousins that is either as good or better than his first 32 games as a Viking. We can also say for sure that if the league plays without fans all year, we’ll always wonder how things might have been different.