2026 - Round 26 (Finals Week 2) : The Official Eight

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This week we have three games with home team favourites, but expected to be won by less than three goals, and a single game with an away team favourite expected to be won by over four goals.

When I say expected, I mean expected by the bookmakers, but the MoS and MARS family have other ideas, bereft as they are of player knowledge. It’s probably fair that the Lions should start favourites against the Swans, but four goals puts a huge impost on the missing players and I’m very much minded of the recent work I’ve been doing with Claude that suggests the importance of players over-and-above team is often overstated.

It will be fascinating to find out how true that is this week.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

Contrarian tips are only in the Swans v Lions game where MoSHBODS_Marg and MARS_Marg are joined only by the most unlikely of bedfellows, Home Sweet Home and Consult the Ladder.

Amongst the Margin Predictors the only margin forecast range of note comes in that Swans game where it is a whopping 49 points.

ENS_Linear, MoSHBODS_Marg and MARS_Marg are Extreme Predictors in two games each.

Likewise, amongst the Probability Predictors the only forecast range of note comes in the Swans game where it is 46 percentage points.

MoSHBODS_Prob is the Extreme Predictors in three games this week.





WAGERS

Again just two wagers this week, both small line wagers, one on Fremantle and one on Adelaide.

(Please click on the image below to access a larger version.)

Roughly speaking, the potential gains will be about 0.5c best case and the losses about 0.7c worst case.

The veto rules prevented huge wagers on the Swans in the head-to-head and line markets.

News on whether this was a blessing or a curse on Saturday afternoon.

To finish, here are MoSHBODS’ and MARS’ opinions about likely team scoring, margins and probabilities.

Commentary about the MoSHBODS’ Totals forecasts will come in the week's Overs/Unders blog and MoSHPlay’s various forecasts will be posted after the relevant team line-ups are made public.