Collingwood have opened up small gaps atop both the MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS Ratings Systems after comprehensively accounting for Port Adelaide in a 39 point and 14 scoring shot victory.

MoSHPlay backed up its 9 from 9 in Round 6 with a 7 from 9 in Round 7 to maintain a one tip lead as a Head-to-Head Tipster, but more importantly recorded an 18.7 points per game mean absolute error (MAE) as a Margin Predictor, the best of the round, and enough to see it to leap into third-place there.

Some big differences between MoSHPlay and MoSHBODS this week, most notably in the following games

Ah the comforting cadence of a week where the footy starts on Friday night and finishes on Sunday evening, and all the Totals markets are up by Wednesday …

I’m done speculating about how well the MoS forecasters might do on the basis of bookmaker expected margins, so let me, instead, just let you know that the TAB bookmaker has an average expected margin this week of 19.5 points per game, which is the lowest for a Round 7 since - at least - 2012.

A little quieter on the MoS Team Rating Systems this week, especially near the top where we now find both Systems agreeing on a Top 3 of Collingwood, GWS and Geelong.

After suggesting on Tuesday that no-one should expect to tip all nine results in the round, MoSHPlay went and did exactly that, out-tipping MoSHBODS using the player information that only it had.

It’s Wednesday, and all of the Totals markets are up at the TAB. Even after a decade at this caper, I feel certain I will never truly understand it.

After the announcement of the teams, MoSHPlay has lopped 8 points off MoSHBODS’ forecast victory margin for the Tigers, ending up with a Tigers by 7 forecast of its own.

Here’s what we have for … Wednesday’s and Thursday’s games (as if it wasn’t bad enough with a four day turnaround on all this stuff).

This week we’re back to low expected margins, with the nine-game average coming in at 15.4 points per game, which is roughly what we had for Round 3 and Round 4. We arrived at that figure of 15.4 via seven games with expected margins below 3 goals and two with expected margins of around 4 goals.

This week, it’s Collingwood’s turn, again, to fill top spot on the MoS Team Rating Systems, nudging GWS back into 2nd on both. Further down the table, Port Adelaide did enough on MoSSBODS to grab 3rd spot, but not quite enough to take 3rd from Geelong on MoSHBODS.

The Head-to-Head Tipsters averaged just over 50% between them this week, the best haul being MoSSBODS_Marg’s 6 from 9 and the worst Home Sweet Home’s 2 from 9.

We are, at last, close to convergence, as the bookmakers have finally conceded that lower scores are likely to be here for at least a while yet. This week, the MoS twins’ average expected total is only about half a goal lower than the bookmakers’.

Not a lot of movement from MoSHPlay away from MoSHBODS after the announcement of the Sydney and Melbourne teams. MoSHPlay is going Swans by 2.

Here’s what we have for Thursday’s and Friday’s games:

Taking the bookmakers’ estimated pre-game head-to-head probabilities as a guide, an average tipster should have predicted about 21 or 22 of the first 36 games, which comes out at a little over 5 per round. This week, making the same calculation, we should be expecting about 5.6 to 5.8 correct tips.

I was wrong: we were destined for another change of lead in the MoS Team Rating Systems, with both moving GWS back into top spot after their win over the Cats this weekend. Our previous leaders, the Cats, were shunted back to 3rd on MoSHBODS and 4th on MoSSBODS.

All up, a fairly difficult round in which to tip winners, but less so a difficult round to forecast margins.

The MoS twins’ opinions are again a little closer to the bookmakers’ this week, but they remain resolutely south in their totals forecasts.