Scoring Shot Conversion History in the VFL/AFL (1897-2015)

The off-season always seems a good time for adopting a more sweeping historical perspective in the analyses here on MatterOfStats. Today we're going to be reviewing Scoring Shot Conversion rates across the 119 seasons of the VFL/AFL from both a venue and a team perspective.

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The Ideal Competition: How Many Blowouts and Upsets?

Working on a few recent posts here on the Statistical Analysis journal has made me think a lot more about blowouts (games won by a large margin) and upsets (games won by the team less-favoured to win pre-game), and realise how inter-related is their prevalence.

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Why 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.

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Winning 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.

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On 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.

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An 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.

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What'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?

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Can 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.

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Is 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?

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Predicting 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.

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