Is Class More or Less Important In AFL Finals?

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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.
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Game Margins and the Generalised Tukey Lambda Distribution

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The Normal Distribution often turns up, like the Spanish Inquisition, in places where you've no a priori reason to expect it. For example, I've shown before that bookmaker handicap-adjusted margins appear to be distributed Normally.
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The Predictability of Game Margins

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In a recent blog post I described how the results of games in 2013 have been more predictable than game results from previous seasons in the sense that the final victory margins have been, on average, closer to what you'd have expected them to be based on a reasonably constructed predictive model. In short, teams have this year won by margins closer to what an informed observer, like a Bookmaker, would have expected.
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The Predictability of 2013

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Friend of MAFL, Michael, e-mailed me earlier to ask about my claim that 2013 was on track to be the most predictable MAFL season ever, pointing out, quite correctly, that bookmaker favourites have been winning at about the same rate - perhaps even at a slightly higher rate - as they had been at the same time last year.
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Game Statistics and the Dream Team

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Today, a new voice comes to MAFL. It's Andrew's. He's the guy that uncovered the treasure-trove of game statistics on the AFL website and he's kindly contributed a blog taking you through some of the analyses he's performed on that data. Let me be the first to say "welcome mate". I have lurked on the sidelines of MAFL and Matter of Stats for a couple of years and enjoyed many conversations with Tony about his blogs. I found myself infected with curiosity and so, with gratitude to Tony, here's my newbie blog post.
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Current Teams' All-Time MARS Rankings

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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.
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Which Teams Fare Better as Favourites?

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In this blog, the next is a series in which I've been exploring the all-time MARS Ratings I created for every game from the start of 1897 to the end of the 2012 season, I'll be looking at how well each team has performed depending on the relative strength of its opponent, as measured by their MARS Rating. So, for example, we'll consider how well Collingwood tends to do when playing a team it is assessed as being much stronger than, a little stronger than, about as capable as, and so on.
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The Greatest Upset Victories in VFL/AFL History (1897-2012)

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The Suns' victory over the Saints in the first round of the 2013 season was heralded as an "upset win" for the Suns and one of the greatest in their short history. Undoubtedly their win was unexpected, but even the bookmakers rated the Suns as only $3.75 chances, so it was hardly a Halley's comet-like occurrence.
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Team MARS Ratings Performance By Decade and Overall: 1897 to 2012

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In the previous blog on the topic of all-time MARS Ratings I explained the process I used to derive team Ratings across history and then identified those teams that had achieved the highest (Essendon) and lowest (Fitzroy) MARS Ratings ever. We know then which teams have burned brightest - and which flickered dimmest - across VFL/AFL history. In this blog I want to explore more extended bursts of talent or apparent lack of it.
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And the Best and Worst VFL/AFL Teams of All-Time Are ...

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I've promised for a while now to create MARS Ratings for the entire history of the VFL/AFL and with some time away from home over Easter, I'm now able to deliver on that promise.
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Are the Victory Margins for Some Games Harder to Predict than for Others?

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It's unarguable that the winner of some games will be harder to predict than the winner of others. When genuine equal-favourites meet, for example, you've only a 50:50 chance of picking the winner, but you can give yourself a 90% chances of being right when a team with a 90% probability of victory meets a team with only a 10% chance. The nearer to equal-favouritism the two teams are, the more difficult the winner is to predict, and the further away we are from this situation the easier the game is to predict.
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Building Simple Margin Predictors

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Having a new - and, it seems, generally superior - way to calculate Bookmaker Implicit Probabilities is like having a new toy to play with. Most recently I've been using it to create a family of simple Margin Predictors, each optimised in a different way.
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Does An Extra Day's Rest Matter in the Finals?

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This week Collingwood faces Sydney having played its Semi-Final only 6 day previously while Adelaide take on Hawthorn a more luxurious 8 days after their Semi-Final encounter. The gap for Sydney has been 13 days while that for the Hawks has been 15 days. In this blog we'll assess what, if any, effect these differential gaps between games for competing finalists might have on game outcome.
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Does Crowd Size Affect Game Outcomes?

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Based on empirical evidence we know that there is a home ground advantage in AFL which, in part, might be attributable to the pro-Home team leanings amongst the majority of the crowd. In this blog I want to explore a slightly different question about the effects of the crowd: specifically, does the size of the crowd matter too?
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