Unexpectedly Large Victories in NRL: Parallels With AFL
/In the previous post we saw that large or what might be called "blowout" victories in AFL games occurred at a rate much higher than the rate at which bookmakers assigned equally large handicaps to those same games, and we saw why this might be the case from a theoretical perspective on the assumption that AFL game margins were Normally distributed.
Read MoreWhy There'll Always Be More Blowouts Than We Expect
/Last night I was thinking about the results we found in the previous blog post about upsets and mismatches and wondered if the historical pattern of expected game margins was borne out in the actual results. On analysing the data I found that there were a lot more victories of 10 Scoring Shots or more in magnitude than MoSSBODS had predicted. In most seasons, at least one-third of the games finished with a victory margin equivalent to 10 Scoring Shots or more, which was usually two or three times as many as MoSSBODS had predicted.
Read MoreWinning and Losing Streaks and Their Effects on Team Scoring
/The idea for this blog came in an e-mail from long-time Friend of MoS, Michael, who wondered if the absence of lengthy winning streaks by teams like Hawthorn in 2015 reflected some feature of the game of Australian Rules or of the AFL competition that rendered such streaks self-limiting in length.
Read MoreOn the Relative Importance of Offensive and Defensive Ability in VFL/AFL History
/In the previous post here I introduced MoSSBODS 2.0, a Team Rating System design to provide separate Offensive and Defensive Ratings for teams in the VFL/AFL. Today I want to explore the relationship between teams' Ratings and their on-field success.
Read MoreAn Improved VFL/AFL Team Rating System: MoSSBODS 2.0
/Earlier this year in this blog, I introduced the MoSSBODS Team Rating System, an ELO-style system that provides separate estimates of each team's offensive and defensive abilities, as well as a combined estimate formed from their sum. That blog post describes the main motivations for a MoSSBODS-like approach, which I'll not repeat here.
Read MoreGrand Final Leads - How Much Is Enough?
/Quick question: what proportion of teams that have led at the end of the 1st Quarter of a Grand Final have gone on to take the Flag? Supplementary question: how big does the Quarter-time lead need to be before the probability reaches 90%?
Read MoreInferring 2015 Grand Final Prices
/This time of year it's always fun to consider what the current wagering markets imply about the likely Grand Final prices.
Read MoreTeam-by-Team and Venue-by-Venue Conversion Rate History
/Today's post continues the recent theme of entries here in the Statistical Analysis part of the site, taking yet another look at Scoring Shot Conversion rates but this time on a team-by-team and venue-by-venue basis.
Read MoreConversion Rates in Finals versus Home-and-Away Games
/Subsequent to the previous post, which looked broadly at the differences in aggregate scoring metrics for Home-and-Away games compared to Finals from the same era, Friend of MoS, Liam, made a great suggestion for a follow up analysis.
Read MoreWhat's Different About Finals?
/Finals, by their nature, tend to pit more-evenly matched teams against one another, on average, than do games from the home-and-away season. It seems reasonable, therefore, to hypothesise that margins will tend to be smaller in Finals than in the home-and-away season, but what other changes in scoring behaviour might we expect to see?
Read MoreThe 2015 Finalists: A Quarter-by-Quarter Head-to-Head Analysis
/As the FootyMaths Institute has highlighted in its most recent post, this year sees a startlingly wide spread of winning rates amongst the eight Finalists when we consider only their games from the home-and-away seasons against one another.
Read MoreTeam Ratings and Ladder Finishes: 1999 to 2015
/There's been a lot of discussion about the unusual situation of Fremantle, which finds itself Minor Premiers but only on the third line of the Flag wagering markets.
Read MoreCan We Use Head-to-Head Market Movements in the Line Market?
/Yesterday's post led to an interesting Twitter thread last evening, which included a suggestion to reanalyse the data to determine whether price movements in the Pinnacle head-to-head market might have predictive value in other markets for the same game, specifically in the line market.
Read MoreIs There a Signal in Head-to-Head Market Movements?
/Watching the TAB markets as they've shifted across the course of a week I've often wondered if there might be something predictive in those movements. If the eventual favourite's price has shortened during the week, does it win more or less often than its closing price would suggest?
Read MorePredicting Bookmaker Head-to-Head Prices : Five Years On
/Recently, in light of the discussions about the validity of the season simulations written up over on the Simulations journal, I got to thinking about modelling the Bookmaker's price-setting behaviour and how it might be expected to respond to the outcomes of earlier games in the season. It's a topic I've investigated before, but not for a while.
Read MoreHome and Away Season Competition Points and Scoring Metrics
/On Twitter today someone made the observation that teams' accuracy or conversion rate differentials seemed to have been strongly correlated with their final ladder position.
Read MoreLeads and Lead Changes in AFL
/In the previous blog here on Statistical Analysis I referred to this paper and applied its drift-free Random Walk model to the "safety" of leads recent AFL history, finding that, to some extent, it fitted empirical data well.
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Are AFL Games Like Random Walks?
/I came across an interesting journal article this week, published in March of 2015 on arXiv.org and entitled "Safe Leads and Lead Changes in Competitive Team Sports".
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