Scoring Shot Conversion Rates: How Predictable Are They?

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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.

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Modelling the Total Score of an AFL Game

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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.

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Modelling Team Scores as Weibull Distributions : Part II

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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.

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Estimating Home Ground Advantage by Venue

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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.
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What's More Important: Who You Play or Where You Play Them?

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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.
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Revisiting Home Ground Advantage

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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.
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The Relative Importance of Class and Form in AFL

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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?
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Are the Victory Margins for Some Games Harder to Predict than for Others?

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It's unarguable that the winner of some games will be harder to predict than the winner of others. When genuine equal-favourites meet, for example, you've only a 50:50 chance of picking the winner, but you can give yourself a 90% chances of being right when a team with a 90% probability of victory meets a team with only a 10% chance. The nearer to equal-favouritism the two teams are, the more difficult the winner is to predict, and the further away we are from this situation the easier the game is to predict.
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Does An Extra Day's Rest Matter in the Finals?

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This week Collingwood faces Sydney having played its Semi-Final only 6 day previously while Adelaide take on Hawthorn a more luxurious 8 days after their Semi-Final encounter. The gap for Sydney has been 13 days while that for the Hawks has been 15 days. In this blog we'll assess what, if any, effect these differential gaps between games for competing finalists might have on game outcome.
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Deconstructing The 2011 TAB Sportsbet Bookmaker

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To what extent can the head-to-head prices set by the TAB Sportsbet Bookmaker in 2011 be modelled using only the competing teams' MAFL MARS Ratings, their respective Venue Experiences, and the Interstate Status of the fixture?
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Predicting the Home Team's Final Margin: A Competition Amongst Predictive Algorithms

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With fewer than half-a-dozen home-and-away rounds to be played, it's time I was posting to the Simulations blog, but this year I wanted to see if I could find a better algorithm than OLS for predicting the margins of victory for each of the remaining games.
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A First Look at the 2011 Draw

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In this blog I'll be reviewing the 2011 draw in terms of Venue Experience, a term that I defined and explored in an earlier blog. A team's Venue Experience for a given game is defined as the number of times that the team has played at that game's venue during the immediately preceding 12 calendar months, including finals.
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Home Ground Advantage: Fans and Familiarity

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In AFL, playing at home is a distinct advantage, albeit perhaps a little less of an advantage than it once was. So, around this time of year, I usually spend a few days agonising over the allocation of home team status for each game in the upcoming season.
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