2026 - Team Ratings After Round 22
/MoSHBODS changed the ranking of 10 teams this week, including flipping Sydney up into 2nd and Hawthorn down into 5th leaving a Top 3 of Fremantle, Sydney, and Geelong.
The only other multi-spot mover was Adelaide (down 2 into 8th).
MARS also rerated 10 teams, including moving Sydney into 3rd and Brisbane Lions into 4th, and slipping Hawthorn down into 5th to leave it with a Top 3 of Fremantle, Geelong, and Sydney.
Hawthorn and Brisbane Lions were its only multi-spot movers.
MoSHBODS RATINGS
Overall, MoSHBODS has only 10 teams rated as above average with the Dogs and Giants now just falling below the cutoff.
On the Component Ratings, on offence we find MoSHBODS still with a Top 3 of Lions, Swans, and Cats, while on defence it now has a Top 3 of Dockers, Crows, and Pies. Twelve teams are rated as above average on offence but only six on defence.
Offensive ratings currently span a range of 1.52 standard deviations (up) and defensive ratings a range of 1.31 standard deviations (down). The standard deviation of offensive ratings across all teams is 0.45 and that for defensive ratings 0.33. Increasingly, teams are more differentiated by their offensive abilities than by their defensive abilities.
The correlation between the teams’ MoSHBODS offensive and defensive Ratings now stands at +0.70, which is slightly up 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 22 (recognising that this will have meant different numbers of games per team in different years)
We see that the Dockers remain the only team rated above the median for Grand Finalists at this point of the season in the context of history.
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 only 10 teams rated better-than-average, with the Western Bulldogs next lowest below the cutoff and probably one or two good results away from lifting above it.
As noted earlier, it now has a Top 3 of Fremantle, Geelong, and Sydney, which is the same composition as MoSHBODS but with 2nd and 3rd swapped.
The gap from 1st to 2nd is now 5.5 Rating Points (down), from 1st to 4th is 12.4 Rating Points (down), and from 1st to 10th is 35.3 Rating Points (up).
Across all 18 teams, the Ratings span 89.3 Rating Points (down), the mean is 1,000 Rating Points, and the standard deviation is 28 Rating Points (down).
COMPARISON OF MOSHBODS AND MARS
The correlation between MoSHBODS’ Combined Ratings and MARS’ Ratings stands at +0.988 and, roughly speaking, each team’s Combined MoSHBODS Rating is about 0.025 times its MARS Rating less 25.25.
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
None
HIGHER ON THE TEAM RATING SYSTEMS THAN ON THE LADDER
Geelong
MoSHBODS and MARS agree about the ranking of eight teams now, and differ by as much as two spots about only four teams, Adelaide, Collngwood, GWS, and St Kilda.
Overall, the rank correlation between the two Systems is +0.977.
