FANTASY TOURNAMENTS USING MOSHBODS’ TEAM RATINGS
It’s a common source of debate: would an outstanding team from yesteryear defeat a modern-day team? Frankly, I think it’s a conversation not worth having because its inherently unanswerable.
So, let me start out here by saying that I don’t think the fantasy tournaments I’ll be posting about here shed any meaningful light on that debate.
What they’ll do, instead, is say: if a team from a previous era was an dominant relative to its peers today as it was at the time, how would they fare in a knockout competion against teams from other eras?
How Does It Work?
All of the fantasy tournaments will treat a team as being a particular team from a particular season (eg Collingwood 1964, Richmond 2012 etc) and will measure its ability using its MoSHBODS Team Ratings in some way.
You might recall that these Ratings are measured in standard deviations relative to the average team score of the time so, for example, a team with a +1.5 offensive rating in an era where average team scores were 60 points per game with a standard deviation of 20 points would be expected to score 60 + 20 x 1.5 or 90 points against an average team at a neutral venue.
The use of era average team scores and standard deviations gives us a way of converting team relative abilities across time. So, if we took that team with +1.5 SD offensive rating into 2026 where the average team score is about 85 points and the standard deviation 25 points they would then be expected to score 85 + 25 x 1.5 or 97.5 points against an average team at a neutral venue.
That’s they key to having a 1929 Collingwood team playing a 2012 Sydney team in our fantasy tournaments.
