As I write this, the bookmakers have Melbourne and Collingwood as favourites for the upcoming semi-finals, but only by about 13 and 9 points respectively, so there’d be no great surprise were there to be upsets in both games.

Richmond preserved their narrow leads on both the MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS Team Rating Systems, remaining just 0.3 Scoring Shots ahead of Melbourne on MoSSBODS, and dropping 0.2 points on MoSHBODS where their lead is now only 1.5 Points.

Historically, especially in recent years, Finals are where the MoS models tend to do best, and this week saw the MoS twins tip all four winners, a feat that no other Head-to-Head Tipster managed.

If scoring was low during the regular, home and away season, it's probably unreasonable to expect it to ramp up dramatically, if at all, during the Finals, and none of our forecasters are predicting any such profligacy. They're suggesting that 80 to 82 points per team is a reasonable expectation for this week.

It seems very early, I know, to be posting forecasts about Finals that are over a week away, but one of the advantages of player-ignorant models is that they are, well, ignorant about players.

Richmond finish the home and away season atop both MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS, though with the smallest leads they've had for some time - just 0.3 Scoring Shots on MoSSBODS, and 1.7 Points on MoSHBODS - after a round in which they narrowly prevailed over the far-lower ranked Western Bulldogs, dropping ratings as a consequence. Melbourne, in contrast, registered a solid win over the similarly-rated GWS both in terms of points and scoring shots, which served to lift their rating on both Systems.

It was another 7 or 8 tip, sub-30 mean absolute error (MAE), positive probability score weekend for most forecasters, the end of which saw relatively little movement on the respective Leaderboards.

There's quite a range of expected totals across the last nine games of the home and away season. For the MoS twins they cover 154 to 183 points - about a 5 goal range - and for the bookmakers they cover 137.5 to 180.5, which is a 7 goal range.

Round 23 is very much a round of two halves, with four of the contests expected to be decided by about two-and-a-half goals or less, and the other five by between 4 and 13 goals.

In the same way that accuracy can be a poor estimator of a forecaster's ability, raw wins, draws and losses can be a poor estimator of a team's ability, so it always amuses at this time of year how readily some commentators will conflate where a team sits of the ladder with how well they've played across the season. There really are such things as lucky wins and unfortunate losses, and sometimes the less able team wins and the better able one loses.

Only Consult The Ladder and Home Sweet Home tipped fewer than seven winners this week, which left ENS_Linear still with a two tip lead over Bookie Knows Best at the top of the Leaderboard.

ENS_Linear is now on 134.5 from 189 (71%).

If, as it seems, the mean total score for an AFL game in 2018 is 165 to 170 points, last weekend was a textbook example of regression to the mean after the relative scorefest that was Round 20.

Just three games this week are expected to finish with a margin under 3 goals, but seven with a margin under 5 goals, which has made for an all-game average of about the same as last weekend's 24.5 points per game. This week, it's 24.2 points per game.

There was very little movement on either MoS System this week, with MoSSBODS swapping Sydney into 10th and dropping Brisbane Lions into 12th, and MoSHBODS moving Essendon ahead of Geelong, and the Western Bulldogs ahead of the Brisbane Lions. For the remaining teams, there were rating changes, but they were relatively small.

The MoS twins were very bullish about the Dees' chances this weekend and paid the price in all three of our forecaster fields.

Last week produced almost 190 points per game, which was about 3.5 to 4 goals higher than our forecasters' expectations, but this hasn't much elevated expectations for this week, especially those of the bookmakers.

It seems very unlikely we'll enjoy close football this weekend of the likes we saw on Friday and Saturday of Round 20 - at least not in the quantity we saw there, with this week's fare including only one game with an expected margin of under two goals.

This week for the MoS twins was mainly about MoSSBODS' coming to agree with MoSHBODS' ranking of West Coast, and the pair coming to agree also about the ranking of Port Adelaide. West Coast are now 5th on both Systems, and Port Adelaide 10th.

The RSMP twins regained lost ground this week, but still sit three tips behind the second-placed Bookie Knows Best and four behind the leader, ENS_Linear, who is now on 122.5 from 171 (72%).

Another week, another sub-170 point average total score expectation, though this week we can maybe hope that four games will exceed that threshold.