The men’s AFL fixture for 2023 was released earlier this week, and tradition requires that the MoS website publishes its assessment of which teams fared best and which worst in that fixture given what the MoS models think about relative team strengths and venue effects.

This week I’ve been investigating the use of the Skellam Distribution in modelling AFL scores. That distribution can be derived as the difference between two, correlated, Poisson variables, which potentially makes it useful in an AFL context for modelling differences between team metrics.

Every year there’ll be a game or twelve where the fans of the losing team lament a lop-sided freekick count and largely attribute their team’s loss to the ineptitude (or worse) of the officiating. This will especially be the case where the visiting team has been on the thin end of the freekick count.

Commentators are keen to point out how especially important they feel are the minutes just before a change - especially before the final change - so today we’re going to investigate how our in-running estimate of a team’s victory probability at three-quarter time should be influenced by any streaks of scoring leading up to the break.

I thought that this year I might not have time to perform the traditional Strength of Schedule analysis, having spent far too long during the off-season re-optimising the MoS twins (more on which in a future blog), but here I am on a rainy night in Sydney with a toothache that a masochist would label ‘unpleasantly painful’ and the prospect of sleep before tomorrow’s 11:30am dental appointment fairly remote. So, let’s do it …