Ranking the Effectiveness of Home-Field Advantages

The NFL playoffs is often times a test of which teams can defend their home turf and which teams can transcend on the road.

Legendary stadiums and relative newcomers on the NFL landscape make up the venues that are discussed, but as anyone knows, the team that inhabits the home is more important than the home itself.

Here are the top four teams in the playoff picture right now, and how their home field advantages stack up against one another.

Green Bay Packers

Playing at Lambeau in January can be a tall order. However, the very thing that makes it tough for opponents also threatens to slow down the aerial attack of the Packers as well. 

Swirling wind and snow are sure to knock an opponent off their game, but does the benefit of slowing down opponents get negated by slowing down the home team as well?

Green Bay's defense is opportunistic enough to make up for any slow down on offense and, therefore, the advantage for Green Bay at home is still very high.

New England Patriots

The Patriots boasted one of the longest home winning streaks in the NFL at Gillette Stadium. 

Brady and his bunch on offense are a daunting task no matter where you play them, but their aura and legend is alive and well at home and makes for intimidating surroundings.

The weather can be just as disrupting in New England as anywhere else, but the Patriots have won many a snow game in their time. 

San Francisco 49ers

The San Francisco 49ers are in desperate need of a new stadium to call home, as evidenced by the multiple power outages on national television last week.

The Niners probably don't even like playing in their own stadium, apart from the support of their home crowd. Still, support alone might not be enough to strike fear into the hearts of opponents.

Baltimore Ravens

Anyone outside of Maryland know the name of the Ravens home field?

It's M&T Bank Stadium, and it is not widely regarded as a brutal road destination. However, the team you face when get to Baltimore is as tough as any in the NFL.

This is one scenario out of many that boils down to, no matter where you play this team, it's going to be tough.