Close Games in VFL/AFL History: Do Successful Teams Win Them?

Recently, we've looked at the history of margins, of blowouts, mismatches and upsets, and the history of conversion rates. Today we'll be looking at the history of close games, which I'll define as games that are decided by a goal or less.

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Scoring Shot Conversion History in the VFL/AFL (1897-2015)

The off-season always seems a good time for adopting a more sweeping historical perspective in the analyses here on MatterOfStats. Today we're going to be reviewing Scoring Shot Conversion rates across the 119 seasons of the VFL/AFL from both a venue and a team perspective.

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The Ideal Competition: How Many Blowouts and Upsets?

Working on a few recent posts here on the Statistical Analysis journal has made me think a lot more about blowouts (games won by a large margin) and upsets (games won by the team less-favoured to win pre-game), and realise how inter-related is their prevalence.

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Winning and Losing Streaks and Their Effects on Team Scoring

The idea for this blog came in an e-mail from long-time Friend of MoS, Michael, who wondered if the absence of lengthy winning streaks by teams like Hawthorn in 2015 reflected some feature of the game of Australian Rules or of the AFL competition that rendered such streaks self-limiting in length.

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On the Relative Importance of Offensive and Defensive Ability in VFL/AFL History

In the previous post here I introduced MoSSBODS 2.0, a Team Rating System design to provide separate Offensive and Defensive Ratings for teams in the VFL/AFL. Today I want to explore the relationship between teams' Ratings and their on-field success.

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What's Different About Finals?

Finals, by their nature, tend to pit more-evenly matched teams against one another, on average, than do games from the home-and-away season. It seems reasonable, therefore, to hypothesise that margins will tend to be smaller in Finals than in the home-and-away season, but what other changes in scoring behaviour might we expect to see?

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Winning Scores and Underdogs' Chances

Recently, I noted, somewhat in passing in this piece on close game and blowouts, the decline in overall team scoring, a topic that's receiving not a little attention within the football community at the moment, fuelled partly by some recent low-scoring games, in particular the Dees v Lions encounter.

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Best and Worst AFL Teams 2005 - 2015: A MoSSBOD Perspective

In the last blog on this part of the site I introduced the MoSSBOD Team Rating System, the defining characteristics of which were that it Rated teams based on Scoring Shot Production and Concession and that it provided both a Defensive and an Offensive Rating for all teams.

Today I want to explore the history of those Ratings across the last decade to see what MoSSBOD has to say about the strongest and weakest Offensive and Defensive teams across that period.

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AFL Crowds and Optimal Uncertainty

Fans the world over, the literature shows, like a little uncertainty in their sports. AFL fans are no different, as I recounted in a 2012 blog entitled Do Fans Really Want Close Games? in which I described regressions showing that crowds were larger at games where the level of expected surprisal or 'entropy' was higher.

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