T

he topic is home-field advantage, but on second thought, maybe Matt Birk isn't the best guy for this job. This past December, the Baltimore Ravens center and his wife Adrianna welcomed their sixth child, Brady, into the world.

"Home-field advantage?" Birk said recently, laughing. "Not anymore."

The raw numbers over the past decade suggest the Ravens are the happiest at home among the NFL's 32 teams. So why doesn't M&T Bank Stadium turn up on those ubiquitous lists of the league's toughest venues?

"That's a question for your colleagues in the media," said Birk, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics. "No. 1, I'm going to say that over the years the Ravens have fielded a pretty good football team. No. 2, the fans here are great.

"It's pretty simple. There's your home-field advantage."

Ah, home sweet home ... where the heart is ... a state of mind. That metaphorical place to which you can never, ever, truly return.

In the hurly-burly world of the NFL, however, it is a concrete concept -- as starkly real as a Jason Pierre-Paul sack.

Over the past decade, only one team -- the New York Giants -- has managed to produce a better winning percentage on the road than at home. The Saints (45-37 on the road and 46-37 at home over that time) have come tantalizingly close. The fact that those two teams have won three of the past five Super Bowls underlines the importance of succeeding in the face of that home-field advantage.