2026 - Team Ratings After Round 17

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MoSHBODS changed the ranking of 11 teams this week, including moving Sydney into 3rd ahead of the elevated Lions and the demoted Hawks, making its Top 3 now Fremantle, Geelong, and Sydney.

Further down the order, the multi-spot movers were Melbourne (up 3 into 6th), and Carlton (down 3 into 10th, despite winning).

MARS rerated only nine teams, also moving Sydney into 3rd ahead of an elevated Lions and demoted Hawks, making its Top 3 also Fremantle, Geelong, and Sydney.

Its multi-spot movers, apart from Hawthorn were Melbourne (up 2 into 7th), Collingwood (up 3 into 9th), St Kilda (up 2 into 11th), Carlton (down 3 into 10th), Western Bulldogs (down 2 into 12th), and Gold Coast (down 2 into 13th).

MoSHBODS RATINGS

Overall, MoSHBODS now has 13 teams rated as above average with Gold Coast joining that list this week.

On the Component Ratings, on offence we find MoSHBODS with a Top 3 of Lions, Cats, and Swans, while on defence it now has a Top 3 of Dockers, Crows, and Power. Thirteeen teams are rated as above average on offence but only eight on defence.

Offensive ratings currently span a range of 1.42 standard deviations (down) and defensive ratings a range of 1.25 standard deviations (down). The standard deviation of offensive ratings across all teams is 0.41 and that for defensive ratings 0.32. Teams therefore continue to be more differentiated by their offensive abilities than their defensive abilities.

The correlation between the teams’ MoSHBODS offensive and defensive Ratings now stands at +0.69, which is down a little on last week.

We can put the MoSHBODS Ratings into an historical context by looking at the offensive and defensive ratings that teams in other seasons had after Round 17 (recognising that this will have meant different numbers of games per team in different years)

We see that the Dockers, Cats, and Hawks (barely) are the only teams rated above the median for Grand Finalists at this point of the season in the context of history, with the Dockers very close to being in the top decile.

We can also look at the trajectory that each team has taken so far in 2026 to arrive at their current rating.

MARS RATINGS

MARS now has 13 teams rated better-than-average, with St Kilda jumping into 11th on that list this week.

As noted earlier, it once again has exactly the same Top 3 as MoSHBODS after making identical moves to get Sydney into 3rd..

The gap from 1st to 2nd is now 1.3 Rating Points (up), from 1st to 4th is 10 Rating Points (down), and from 1st to 10th is 29.8 Rating Points (down).

Across all 18 teams, the Ratings span 82.3 Rating Points (down), the mean is 1,000 Rating Points, and the standard deviation is 25 Rating Points (down).

COMPARISON OF MOSHBODS AND MARS

The correlation between MoSHBODS’ Combined Ratings and MARS’ Ratings stands at +0.985 and, roughly speaking, each team’s Combined MoSHBODS Rating is about 0.0263 times its MARS Rating less 26.3.

Looking firstly at the comparison between the ordering of the teams on MoSHBODS and MARS compared to their ordering on the competition ladder we see that the teams with the largest discrepancies are:

HIGHER ON THE LADDER THAN ON THE TEAM RATING SYSTEMS

  • Western Bulldogs and North Melbourne

HIGHER ON THE TEAM RATING SYSTEMS THAN ON THE LADDER

  • Geelong

MoSHBODS and MARS agree about the ranking of nine teams now, and differ by at least three spots on only two teams, most of all still on GWS, who MARS have 8th and MoSHBODS have 13th.

You can see on the earlier chart that GWS lies furthest from the regression line.

Overall, the rank correlation between the two Systems is +0.955.