December 07, 2015

The 2016 AFL Draw: Difficulty and Distortion

December 07, 2015/ Tony Corke

The 2016 AFL Draw, released in late October, once again sees teams playing only 22 of the 34 games required for an all-plays-all, home-and-away competition. In determining which 12 games - 6 at home and 6 away - a given team will miss, the League has in the interests of what it calls "on-field equity" applied a 'weighted rule', which is a mechanism for reducing the average disparity in ability between opponents, using the final ladder positions of 2015 as the measure of that ability.

November 28, 2015

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

November 28, 2015/ Tony Corke

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.

November 25, 2015

Scoring Shot Conversion in the VFL/AFL - Quantifying Team, Venue and Era Effects

November 25, 2015/ Tony Corke

In the previous blog we reviewed the Conversion Rate history of the VFL/AFL competition looking, in turn, at how it has varied across eras for different venues and for different teams. That blog provides some useful context for this one and you might find it helpful to review it before proceeding.

November 23, 2015

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

November 23, 2015/ Tony Corke

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.

November 22, 2015

Competitiveness in the VFL/AFL (1897-2015)

November 22, 2015/ Tony Corke

It's been a while since we've reviewed the history of game margins and, in today's blog, we'll consider that history from a number of perspectives.

November 20, 2015

The Ideal Competition: How Many Blowouts and Upsets?

November 20, 2015/ Tony Corke

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.

November 19, 2015

Unexpectedly Large Victories in NRL: Parallels With AFL

November 19, 2015/ Tony Corke

In the previous post we saw that large or what might be called "blowout" victories in AFL games occurred at a rate much higher than the rate at which bookmakers assigned equally large handicaps to those same games, and we saw why this might be the case from a theoretical perspective on the assumption that AFL game margins were Normally distributed.

November 18, 2015

Why There'll Always Be More Blowouts Than We Expect

November 18, 2015/ Tony Corke

Last night I was thinking about the results we found in the previous blog post about upsets and mismatches and wondered if the historical pattern of expected game margins was borne out in the actual results. On analysing the data I found that there were a lot more victories of 10 Scoring Shots or more in magnitude than MoSSBODS had predicted. In most seasons, at least one-third of the games finished with a victory margin equivalent to 10 Scoring Shots or more, which was usually two or three times as many as MoSSBODS had predicted.

November 17, 2015

Upsets and Mismatches in VFL/AFL History: A MoSSBODS 2.0 Perspective

November 17, 2015/ Tony Corke

A few years ago, I used the MARS Rating System to identify those games from VFL/AFL history that might be considered as the greatest upsets in that the loser's MARS Rating was very much higher than the winner's.

November 12, 2015

Winning and Losing Streaks and Their Effects on Team Scoring

November 12, 2015/ Tony Corke

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.

November 05, 2015

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

November 05, 2015/ Tony Corke

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.

November 03, 2015

An Improved VFL/AFL Team Rating System: MoSSBODS 2.0

November 03, 2015/ Tony Corke

Earlier this year in this blog, I introduced the MoSSBODS Team Rating System, an ELO-style system that provides separate estimates of each team's offensive and defensive abilities, as well as a combined estimate formed from their sum. That blog post describes the main motivations for a MoSSBODS-like approach, which I'll not repeat here.

October 01, 2015

Grand Final Leads - How Much Is Enough?

October 01, 2015/ Tony Corke

Quick question: what proportion of teams that have led at the end of the 1st Quarter of a Grand Final have gone on to take the Flag? Supplementary question: how big does the Quarter-time lead need to be before the probability reaches 90%?

September 23, 2015

Inferring 2015 Grand Final Prices

September 23, 2015/ Tony Corke

This time of year it's always fun to consider what the current wagering markets imply about the likely Grand Final prices.

September 17, 2015

Team-by-Team and Venue-by-Venue Conversion Rate History

September 17, 2015/ Tony Corke

Today's post continues the recent theme of entries here in the Statistical Analysis part of the site, taking yet another look at Scoring Shot Conversion rates but this time on a team-by-team and venue-by-venue basis.

September 16, 2015

Conversion Rates in Finals versus Home-and-Away Games

September 16, 2015/ Tony Corke

Subsequent to the previous post, which looked broadly at the differences in aggregate scoring metrics for Home-and-Away games compared to Finals from the same era, Friend of MoS, Liam, made a great suggestion for a follow up analysis.

September 14, 2015

What's Different About Finals?

September 14, 2015/ Tony Corke

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?

September 10, 2015

The 2015 Finalists: A Quarter-by-Quarter Head-to-Head Analysis

September 10, 2015/ Tony Corke

As the FootyMaths Institute has highlighted in its most recent post, this year sees a startlingly wide spread of winning rates amongst the eight Finalists when we consider only their games from the home-and-away seasons against one another.

September 09, 2015

Team Ratings and Ladder Finishes: 1999 to 2015

September 09, 2015/ Tony Corke

There's been a lot of discussion about the unusual situation of Fremantle, which finds itself Minor Premiers but only on the third line of the Flag wagering markets.

September 05, 2015

Can We Use Head-to-Head Market Movements in the Line Market?

September 05, 2015/ Tony Corke

Yesterday's post led to an interesting Twitter thread last evening, which included a suggestion to reanalyse the data to determine whether price movements in the Pinnacle head-to-head market might have predictive value in other markets for the same game, specifically in the line market.

Statistical Analyses