Wins by each of the competition's and MARS Rating's four top teams ensured that there was no changes at the top of the MARS Leaderboard this week.

A little further down the table, the Roos and Richmond swapped 6th and 7th, the Blues and the Eagles traded 8th and 9th, and the Dogs and the Suns switched 15th and 16th places.

The week's Rating changes have served to further differentiate the teams and have left us with: 

• the largest Ratings Points (RPs) gap between 4th and 8th positions that we've seen all season (it stands at 23 RPs and is up 14 RPs over the past 3 weeks)
• the largest RP gap between 4th and 15th positions (it stands at almost 58 RPs and has grown by about 7.5 RPs over the past 3 weeks)
• the fewest teams Rated over 1,000 that we've had all season (now 9, down from 11 just 2 weeks ago)

Five teams still find themselves Ranked by MARS three places or more differently than they find themselves sitting on the competition ladder. The Roos, the Crows and the Eagles are all ranked 3 places higher on MARS than they sit on the competition ladder, while the Dons and Port Adelaide are each ranked 4 places higher. That's not great news for these latter two teams as they (both only probably, but for different reasons) enter the Finals season.

MARS is still not alone though in Ranking so many teams differently from their competition ladder positions.

In terms of the five teams just mentioned, only in the case of the Dons could it be said that MARS' opinion is in any way unique to it. Colley, in contrast, is far more divergent from the consensus in its opinions about the Roos and Port Adelaide, a consequence of its deliberate blindness to the magnitude of team wins and losses.

ODM's component rankings continue to highlight the contrasting offensive and defensive abilities of the Blues, Dons, Dockers, Roos, Tigers and Eagles. Fremantle, in particular, remain a resolutely better defensive then offensive team, as nicely demonstrated this week by their conceding just 38 points to the Dees but scoring only 133 themselves, which is only 10 points more than Melbourne's average concession per game against all-comers this season.

In terms of predictive accuracy, MARS continues to lead all Rating Systems by at least three correct predictions, the margin it enjoys over Massey. At the other end of the accuracy scale, Colley dropped a tip to its nearest-rival this week and consequently now holds outright last once again.

To finish, here are the teams' latest MARS Rating worms. (Essendon's seems to have spotted an apple somewhere to the south-east ...)