MARS is the week's most active Rating System, altering the position of eight teams including four from last week's Top 7.

A much better showing by MoSSBODS this week helped the Head-to-Head Fund land 2 from 3, and the Unders/Overs and Line Funds each land 3 from 4, and was enough to lift the Overall Portfolio by 3.3c across the weekend. It's now up by 14.7c on the season.

Two unders and two overs wagers this week, a pair of them on games where Investors had neither head-to-head nor line bets, mean that two-thirds of the games now have financial consequences.

There's a far less-balanced feel to the wagering portfolio this week as the Head-to-Head Fund has backed-up on the Dons, this time priced at $11 and facing the Dogs.

MARS, like Goldilocks, reckons its team rankings are "just right" and has, on the strength of that assessment, changed none of them.

Its Top 3 then remain, in order, Sydney, Adelaide, and Hawthorn.

But for the Dons' (apparently) upset victory over the Suns, the weekend would have been a lot worse for Investors, but their 75-69 victory kept the loss to a very manageable 1.2c.

MoSSBODS is this week predicting lower totals than the TAB Bookmaker in eight of the nine contests, sufficiently lower in three games to warrant wagers by the Overs/Unders Fund.

This week's wagers provide another fascinating example of the gap that can sometimes emerge between the views of a (possibly under-informed) team rating system and a (probably better-informed) expert bookmaker.

This week it's MARS doing most of the rethinking about team strengths, it seeing fit to re-rank 11 of the teams on the basis of the Round 20 results including eight teams from its previous Top 10.

The Dees' surprise victory was very much the engine for the weekend's healthy profit though other results also helped ensure that this was the first black-ink round since Round 15.

The Overs/Unders Fund has made just three wagers this week, the fewest it's made since Round 13 when only six games were on offer, and only the second time it's made so few bets in a 9-game round. With experience comes wisdom (or is that uncertainty?).

We've seven wagers this week, three head-to-head and four line, all of them on underdogs.

Just a quick post to answer a question raised in the comments section of an earlier blog on the team-by-team performances of the MoS Tipsters and Predictors. There the requester asked me to undertake another team-by-team analysis, here to summarise each team's performance on the Line market this season.

It is, I'm beginning to think, somehow in the nature of the 2016 season that teams will continue to rise and fall in the rankings of MoS' various Team Rating Systems right up until the Grand Final is over.

Football teams, at this time of the year, can be cagey about the form they're in, which is what I'm hoping is also true of the MoS Funds. Together this week they managed to lose another 1.1% of the original Overall Portfolio Fund, the Head-to-Head Fund shedding 0.9c on a 2 from 4 performance, the Line Fund shedding 1.5c on a 2 from 5 performance, and the Overs/Unders Fund shedding 0.6c on a 3 from 6 performance.

That leaves the Overall Portfolio, having lost money the past four weeks, up by just 6.7c on the season.

The Overs/Unders Fund likes a lot of what it sees in this week's offerings, sufficient to make wagers in six of the nine games, which is the most it's made since Round 10 when it also made six bets.

As I've mentioned previously, I get nervous about wagering at this time of year because the motivations of teams become less clear. In modelling terms, this can manifest as a change in a team's mean ability, as an increase in the variability of its performance around that mean, or as both. All you can really do is abstain from wagering or hope that, on balance, the motivation-induced error and variance terms work in your favour.

Well that was quite a round.

Enough, in fact, to have MARS re-ranking half the teams and ChiPS re-ranking eight.

Another poor weekend's wagering saw almost 6c wiped off the value of the Overall Portfolio - another record - as both the Head-to-Head and Line Funds missed on all four of their wagers.  

In keeping with this week's theme of "balance", the Overs/Unders Fund has made four bets this week, two on the unders and two on the overs.