Fantasy football aids empirical thinkers.

• Position: Research Methodology

Home-field advantage on the gridiron is real, declares Ben Motz, who uses sports statistics to jazz up his research methodology courses in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Analysis of National Football League statistics shows that the home team wins about 57% of the matches. In the fall, students in Motz's course, "Prediction, Probability, and Pigskin," will use fantasy football to better understand how to use a range of statistics to predict outcomes. This connection between virtual sports leagues and quantitative analysis likely makes perfect sense to the many people nationwide who scour sports stats each week to manage their mish-mash dream teams.

Fantasy football participants, aka team owners, typically play one other team each week throughout the season, either winning or losing based on the points their players earned according to their performance stats for their real-life games. Owners use statistics for...