Correlations in Team Quarter-to-Quarter Scoring
/I'll be using that same dataset today to investigate the extent to which there is a correlational structure in the quarter-to-quarter scoring of the teams in a football contest.
Read MoreAre AFL Scores Like Snowflakes?
/Last weekend while following the progress of a game I was struck by an odd thought: have two games ever had the same scoreline at the end of every quarter?
Read MoreSources of Surprisal : 2006 to 2014 Round 6
/It's been quite a year for upsets in the AFL so far. One of the ways of quantifying just how surprising these results have been is to use surprisals, about which I've written previously on a number of occasions
Read MoreMaking History with VFL/AFL Final Scores
/If the historical game data that I have is correct, we've gone very close to witnessing history this weekend, with the Hawthorn v Fremantle final score of 137-79 coming within a kick of finishing, instead, as a 131-79 win, or as a 138-79 win. Neither of these final scores were ever recorded in the 14,373 game history of the VFL/AFL between 1897 and 2013.
Read MoreTeam Scoring Shots and Conversion Rates
/In response to my earlier post on the explained and unexplained portions of game margins, Friend of MatterOfStats, Michael, e-mailed me to suggest that variability in teams' points-scoring per scoring shot - or, equivalently, teams' conversion rates - might usefully be explored as a source of unexplained variability.
Read MoreExplaining Variability in Game Margins
/Some seasons are notable for the large number of blowout victories they force us to endure - a few recent seasons come immediately to mind - while others are more memorable because of their highly competitive nature. To what extent, I've often wondered, could we attribute a season full of sizable victory margins to the fact that strong teams were more often facing weak teams, making the magnitude of the defeats predictable if still lamentable, versus instead attributing them to on-the-day or random events that were genuinely unforeseeable pre-game?
Read MoreHome Team and Away Team Scores Across VFL/AFL History
/About 18 months ago I investigated the statistical properties of home teams' and away teams' scoring behaviour over the period from the start of the 2006 season to the middle of the 2012 season taken as a whole. In that blog, using the VGAM package, I found that the Normal distribution provided a reasonable fit to the scores of Home teams and a much better fit to the scores of Away teams over that entire period.
Read MoreThe Ten Most Surprising Things I've Learned About AFL So Far
/The last few months have been a generally reflective time for me, and with my decision to leave unchanged the core of MAFL algorithms for 2014 I've been focussing some of that reflection on the eight full seasons I've now spent analysing and predicting AFL results.
Read MoreTo Win A Grand Final You Must First Lead
/History suggests that, as the higher-Rated "Home" team, Hawthorn must lead early and lead well if it is to be confident of success in Saturday's Grand Final, and not assume that its superior Rating will allow it to come back from any substantial deficit.
Read MoreGrand Final History: How Often Does The Better Team Win?
/The VFL competition had no Grand Final in its first season, so it wasn't until 1898 that Essendon were able to establish a most unwelcome first: the inaugural losing favourite
Read MoreTeam Ratings, Bookmaker Prices and the Recent Predictability of Finals
/Last weekend saw three of four underdogs prevail in the first week of the Finals. Based on the data I have, you'd need to go back to 2006 to find a more surprising Week 1 of the Finals and, as highlighted in the previous blog, no matter how far you went back you wouldn't find a bigger upset than Port Adelaide's defeat of the Pies.
Read MoreUpsets and Mismatches in VFL/AFL Finals: 1897 to 2013
/Port Adelaide's victory over Collingwood last weekend was, I discovered last night, the greatest upset in a Final in VFL/AFL history.
Read MorePrime Motivation: An Analysis of Prime Numbers in AFL Scoring
/Earlier this week, the TED talk of Australian radio broadcaster, comedian and self-confessed number geek Adam Spencer was posted online. In it he explains his fascination with prime numbers, in particular the discovery of "monster primes", which got me to wondering about the prevalence of prime numbers amongst football scores.
Read MoreIs Class More or Less Important In AFL Finals?
/You'll hear it said about sport that class emerges when it's needed most. If that applies to football then you'd expect that better teams would be more likely to win games in the Finals than they are games in the regular home-and-away season.
Read MorePredictability of Team Scores: 1897 to 2013
/In today's blog I'll be addressing a range of topics about the season-by-season history of the VFL/AFL
Read MoreFrom One Year To The Next: An Update
/In the early part of 2009, I wrote two blog posts on the topic of teams' season-to-season ladder finishes. In today's blog I'll update the analysis I did then and review the current season with that historical context in mind.
Read MoreCurrent Teams' All-Time MARS Rankings
/I've looked previously at the best and worst AFL teams of all time and, whilst none of the current crop of teams is vying for either of those honours as at the end of Round 11 in the 2013 season, two (GWS and Melbourne) are in the 30 lowest-rated teams ever and one (Hawthorn) is in the 50 highest-rated teams ever.
Read MoreThe Value of MARS Ratings Points Across Time Revisited
/When last I considered the issue of the value of MARS Ratings across time I assessed their value in terms of a team's victory probability. Perhaps a more intuitive approach would be to, instead, value them in terms of a team's victory margin.
Read MoreOn The Randomness of Final AFL Scores
/You'd be forgiven for assuming that the last digit of a team's final score in an AFL contest was essentially random - in other words that it was as likely to be a 0 as a 1, a 4 or a 9.
Read MoreMeasuring the Surprise in a Season's Results
/In the previous blog we looked at the average level of surprisals generated by teams and by team pairings across all of VFL/AFL history and during the most-recent seasons. Today, as promised in that blog, I'm going to analyse surprisals using the same general methodology, but by season.
Read More
