Grand Final History 1898-2013 : Winning Team Scoring Patterns

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Only three teams in VFL/AFL history have trailed by more than three goals at Quarter Time in the Grand Final and gone on to win. The most recent was Sydney in 2012 who trailled the Hawks by 19 at the first break before rallying in the second term to kick 6.0 to 0.1, eventually going on to win by 10 points, and before that Essendon who in 1984 trailed the Hawks by 21 points at Quarter Time - and still trailed them by 23 points at Three Quarter Time - before recording a 24 point victory on the strength of a 9.6 to 2.1 points avalanche in the final term.

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When Do AFL Teams Score?

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Soccer goals, analysis suggests, are scored at different rates throughout the course of matches as teams tire and as, sometimes, one team is forced to press for a goal or chooses to concentrate on defending. Armed with the data provided by Paul from afltables.com, which includes every scoring and end-of-quarter event from every game played between the start of season 2008 and the end of the home-and-away season of 2014, we can investigate whether or not the same is true of AFL scoring.

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How Many Quarters Will the Home Team Win?

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In this last of a series of posts on creating estimates for teams' chances of winning portions of an AFL game I'll be comparing a statistical model of the Home Team's probability of winning 0, 1, 2, 3 or all 4 quarters with the heuristically-derived model used in the most-recent post.
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How Many Quarters Will the Favourite Win?

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Over the past few blogs I've been investigating the relationship between the result of each quarter of an AFL game and the pre-game head-to-head prices set for that same game. In the most recent blog I came up with an equation that allows us to estimate the probability that a team will win a quarter (p) using as input only that team's pre-game Implicit Victory Probability (V), which we can derive from the pre-game head-to-head prices as the ratio of the team's opponent's price divided by the sum of the two teams' prices.
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Deriving the Relationship Between Quarter-by-Quarter and Game Victory Probabilities

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In an earlier blog we estimated empirical relationships between Home Teams' success rate in each Quarter of the game and their Implicit Probability of Victory, as reflected in the TAB Bookmaker's pre-game prices. It turned out that this relationship appeared to be quite similar for all four Quarters, with the possible exception of the 3rd. We also showed that there was a near one-to-one relationship between the Home Team's Implicit Probability and its actual Victory Probability - in other words, that the TAB Bookmaker's forecasts were well-calibrated. Together, these results imply an empirical relationship between the Home Team's likelihood of winning a Quarter and its likelihood of winning an entire Game. In this blog I'm going to draw on a little probability theory to see if I can derive that relationship theoretically, largely from first principles.
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Evidence for Intra-Game Momentum in AFL Games

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So often in the commentary for an AFL game we hear it said that one team or the other "has the momentum going into the break". This blog sets out to examine this claim - how we might interpret it quantitatively and, given that interpretation, whether or not it's true.
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Predicting the Final SuperMargin Bucket In-Running

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On Friday night, while watching the progress of the Saints v Freo game knowing that Investors has a SuperMargin wager on the Saints to win by 20-29, I was wondering how to react to the changes in the scoreline as the game progressed. Should I want the Saints to lead early? By a little? By a lot? By about 5 points at Quarter Time and 10 points at Half Time?
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Predicting the Final Margin In-Running (and Does Momentum Exist)?

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Just a short post tonight while we wait for the serious footy to begin. For this blog I've again called upon the services of Formulize, this time to find for me equations that predict the final victory margin for the Home team (which might be negative or zero) purely as a function of the scores at the various quarter breaks.
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Projecting the Favourite's Final Margin

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In a couple of earlier blogs I created binary logit models to predict the probability that the favourite would win given a specified lead at a quarter break and the bookmaker's assessed pre-game probability for the favourite. These models allow you to determine what a fair in-running price would be for the favourite. You might instead want to know what the favourite's projected victory margin is given the same input data, so in this blog I'll be providing some simple linear regressions that provide this information.
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Looking At Team Performance Quarter-By-Quarter

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AFL Football - as the cliche goes - is a game of four quarters. The benefit of this arrangement is that AFL scores provide twice as much information about the ebb and flow of each contest as the scores of any other form of football in this country. With the quarter-by-quarter information alone we can perform some interesting analyses for every team.
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Scoring Shots: Not Just Another Statistic

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For a while now I've harboured a suspicion that teams that trail at a quarter's end but that have had more scoring shots than their opponent have a better chance of winning than teams that trail by a similar amount but that have had fewer scoring shots than their opponent. Suspicions that are amenable to trial by data have a Constitutional right to their day in court, so let me take you through the evidence.
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