Inferring Finals Chances From MARS Team Ratings
/If the Dogs make this year's Grand Final they'll also make history as the lowest MARS Rated team after 5 rounds to do so in the modern era.
Read MoreThe 2015 AFL Draw: Schedule Strength, Imbalance and Impact
/The AFL draw remains imbalanced, with teams meeting only five of their 17 potential opponents twice, and meeting the other 12 teams only once.
Read MoreHow Often Does The Best Team Win The Flag?
/Finals series are a significant part of Australian sporting life. No professional team sport I know determines its ultimate victor - as does, say the English Premier League - on the basis of a first-past-the-post system. There's no doubt that a series of Finals adds interest, excitement and theatre (and revenue) to a season, but, in the case of VFL/AFL at least, how often does it result in the best team being awarded the Flag?
Read MoreScoring Shot Conversion Rates: How Predictable Are They?
/In my earlier posts on statistically modelling team scoring (see here and here) I treated Scoring Shot conversion as a phenomenon best represented by the Beta Binomial distribution and proceeded to empirically estimate the parameters for two such distributions, one to model the Home team conversion process and the other to model Away team conversion. The realised conversion rates for the Home team and for the Away team in any particular game were assumed to be random, independent draws from these two fixed distributions.
Read MoreThe Quality of the 2014 Finalists
/Based on end of home-and-away season MARS Ratings, as a group the 2014 Finalists are slightly inferior to their 2013 counterparts (though, oddly enough, the opposite would have been true had the Dons not been relegated to 9th).
Read MoreRetrospective Review of Team Draws for 2014
/Seasons rarely pan out as you expect and team strengths wax and wane over the duration, so it's not entirely surprising that an assessment of the difficulty of a team's draw will differ in retrospect compared to an assessment made in prospect.
Read MoreModelling the Total Score of an AFL Game
/Over the eight seasons from 2006 to 2013 an average AFL game produced about 185 points with a standard deviation of around 33 points. In about one quarter of the games the two teams between them could only muster about 165 points while in another one quarter they racked up 207 points or more.
Read MoreModelling Team Scores as Weibull Distributions : Part II
/In a previous post I discussed the possibility of modelling AFL team scores as Weibull distributions, finding that there was no compelling empirical or other reason to discount the idea and promising to conduct further analyses to more directly assess the Weibull distribution's suitability for the task.
Read MoreAttaching Probabilities to Game Margins: An Application of Quantile Regression
/I first heard about quantile regression, I think, over a decade ago and, for whatever reason, could never quite understand it nor fathom a useful application for it here.
Read MoreThe Ten Most Surprising Things I've Learned About AFL So Far
/The last few months have been a generally reflective time for me, and with my decision to leave unchanged the core of MAFL algorithms for 2014 I've been focussing some of that reflection on the eight full seasons I've now spent analysing and predicting AFL results.
Read MoreEstimating Home Ground Advantage by Venue
/In the previous blog I fitted models to the game margins of each team separately, seeking to explain the margin in any game in terms of the Venue at which the game was played and three "Excess" variables summarising from the designated home team's perspective its relative Venue Experience, MARS Rating and recent form.
Read MoreWhat's More Important: Who You Play or Where You Play Them?
/The benefits of playing at home have been extensively investigated both here on MAFL for Australian Rules football and more generally within the sports prediction community for this and other sports. Put simply, teams that play at home win more often and score more points than you'd otherwise expect them to after adjusting for the quality of the opponents they face.
Read MoreRevisiting Home Ground Advantage
/This week I've been part of a Twitter conversation about Home Ground Advantage in the AFL, a trending topic because of the shift from Football Park to Adelaide Oval for the home games of Adelaide and Port Adelaide in the 2014 season.
Read MoreMARS Rating Changes and Scoring Percentages: 1897-2013
/The idea for this blog sprang from some correspondence with Friend of MAFL, Michael, so let me start by thanking him for being the inspiration.
Michael was interested in exploring the relationship between team performances and the resulting change in their MARS Ratings across a season, which I'll explore here by charting, for each team and every season, the for-and-against percentage they achieved in all games including Finals, and the change in their MARS Rating per game during that same season.
Read MoreAnother View of All-Time AFL Team MARS Ratings Post the 2013 Season
/Recently I'd been noticing some traffic to the site from the Big Footy website where the Forum members had been discussing the relative strengths of Bulldogs teams across VFL/AFL history. That, coupled with my continuing desire to become more proficient in the ggplot2 R package of Hadley Wickham, dragged me out of my off-season blog malaise to perform the analyses underpinning this current posting.
Read MoreHow Good Are Hawthorn, How Poor GWS?
/Without the benefit of emotional and chronological distance it's often difficult to rate the historical merit of recent sporting performances. MAFL's MARS Ratings, whilst by no means the definitive measure of a team's worth, provides one, objective basis on which to assess the teams that ran around in 2013.
Read MoreTo Win A Grand Final You Must First Lead
/History suggests that, as the higher-Rated "Home" team, Hawthorn must lead early and lead well if it is to be confident of success in Saturday's Grand Final, and not assume that its superior Rating will allow it to come back from any substantial deficit.
Read MoreThe Relative Importance of Class and Form in AFL
/Today's blog is motivated by a number of things, the first of which is alluded to in the title: the quantitative exploration of the contributions that teams' underlying class or skill plays in their success in a given game relative to their more recent, more ephemeral form. Is, for example, a top-rated team that's been a little out of form recently more or less likely to beat a less-credentialled team that's been in exceptional form?
Read MoreGrand Final History: How Often Does The Better Team Win?
/The VFL competition had no Grand Final in its first season, so it wasn't until 1898 that Essendon were able to establish a most unwelcome first: the inaugural losing favourite
Read MoreTeam Ratings, Bookmaker Prices and the Recent Predictability of Finals
/Last weekend saw three of four underdogs prevail in the first week of the Finals. Based on the data I have, you'd need to go back to 2006 to find a more surprising Week 1 of the Finals and, as highlighted in the previous blog, no matter how far you went back you wouldn't find a bigger upset than Port Adelaide's defeat of the Pies.
Read More
