Team Ratings, Bookmaker Prices and the Recent Predictability of Finals

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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.
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Prime Motivation: An Analysis of Prime Numbers in AFL Scoring

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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.
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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 Game Outcomes

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My first Matter of Stats blog looked at how game statistics, averaged across an entire season for each team, are predictive of key season outcomes like ladder position, competition points and MARS Ratings. This post summarises similar analyses, but here performed on a per-game basis
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Simulating SuperMargin Wagering

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Season 2013 has been a good one, so far, for SuperMargin wagering, which led me to ponder why that might be the case. More generally, I wondered if we could define the characteristics of a season and of the predictive algorithm that we're using for selecting wagers, which are most propitious for this form of wagering.
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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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Do Bookies Undervalue Team Performance Metrics?

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In 2003 Michael Lewis' Moneyball was published, in which he related the story of Billy Beane, Oakland A's General Manager, and his discovery that the market for baseball players mispriced particular skills. Some skills that could be shown, statistically, as being associated with greater team success weren't recognised as valuable (for example, getting on base, as measured by On-Base Percentage), while other skills were over-valued because of an historical belief that they were related to success (for example, batting in runs, as measured by RBI).
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