Finals series are a significant part of Australian sporting life. No professional team sport I know determines its ultimate victor - as does, say the English Premier League - on the basis of a first-past-the-post system. There's no doubt that a series of Finals adds interest, excitement and theatre (and revenue) to a season, but, in the case of VFL/AFL at least, how often does it result in the best team being awarded the Flag?
Read MoreThis year, Sydney collected its 8th Minor Premiership (including its record when playing as South Melbourne) drawing it level with Richmond in 7th place on the all-time list. That list is headed by Collingwood, whose 19 Minor Premierships have come from from the 118 seasons, one season more than Sydney/South Melbourne and 11 more than Richmond.
Read MoreBased on end of home-and-away season MARS Ratings, as a group the 2014 Finalists are slightly inferior to their 2013 counterparts (though, oddly enough, the opposite would have been true had the Dons not been relegated to 9th).
Read MoreSeasons rarely pan out as you expect and team strengths wax and wane over the duration, so it's not entirely surprising that an assessment of the difficulty of a team's draw will differ in retrospect compared to an assessment made in prospect.
Read MoreI'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 MoreLast 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 MoreIt'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 MoreIf 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 MoreIn 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 MoreSome 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 MoreAbout 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 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.
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