Win Production Functions for AFL Teams - 1897 to 2010

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Right now I'm reading Wayne L Winston's Mathletics, a book about the use of fairly simple mathematics and sports statistics to gain insights into the results of American sports. Inspired by this book, in particular by a piece on Pythagorean Expectation which relates the season-long winning percentage of a baseball team to the total runs that it's scored and allowed, I wondered if an AFL team's win percentage could be similarly predicted by a handful of summary statistics about its own and its opponents' scoring.
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Modelling AFL Team Scoring

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Today's blog is the first in a series that will look at statistically modelling the scoring behaviour of teams in the AFL. If you're profoundly reductionist about it, you can think about a team's footy score as being the product of the number of scoring shots it creates and the proportion of those scoring shots that it converts into goals.
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Goalkicking Accuracy Across The Seasons

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Last weekend's goal-kicking was strikingly poor, as I commented in the previous blog, and this led me to wonder about the trends in kicking accuracy across football history. Just about every sport I can think of has seen significant improvements in the techniques of those playing and this has generally led to improved performance. If that applies to football then we could reasonably expect to see higher levels of accuracy across time.
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