2016 - Team Ratings After Round 9

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ChiPS and MARS continued to fuss with Team Rankings again this week, though they mostly moved teams by only a spot or two. The lone exception was the Western Bulldogs, who MARS slipped three places into 8th on the back of a 25-point loss to the Giants.

Seven other teams moved on MARS Rankings over the weekend, three falling and four rising, to leave MARS now placing Sydney 1st, West Coast 2nd, and Hawthorn 3rd.

ChiPS altered the position of 13 teams altogether this week, though only three by more than a single place, Geelong sliding two places into 3rd, Fremantle also slipping two places and into 14th, and Sydney rising two spots to the top of the list.

ChiPS, as does MARS, now ranks Sydney 1st and West Coast 2nd, but it has Geelong ranked 3rd.

(Note that I've corrected ChiPS' Ratings as at the end of Round 8. Those published last week excluded the last game of the round, the net result of including which was to elevate West Coast into 2nd and demote St Kilda into 14th.)

Only two teams are now ranked more than two places differently by the two Systems:

  • GWS: ranked 7th by MARS and 4th by ChiPS
  • Hawthorn: ranked 3rd by MARS and 6th by ChiPS

The overall correlation between the two System's raw Ratings now stands at +0.979.

A look at the chart of these raw Ratings reveals some natural team groupings emerging.

ChiPS has:

  • Tier 1: Sydney, West Coast, Geelong, GWS
  • Tier 2: Kangaroos, Hawthorn, Adelaide, Western Bulldogs

There's then a 13 Rating Point gap back to Richmond in 9th.

MARS has:

  • Tier 1: Sydney, West Coast, Hawthorn, Geelong
  • Tier 2: Kangaroos, Adelaide, GWS, Western Bulldogs

There's then a 12 Rating Point gap back to Port Adelaide in 9th.

MoSSBODS RATINGS

Uncharacteristically, MoSSBODS was the Rating System moving fewest teams this week on Combined Ratings, it making just a pair of swaps, Adelaide for the Kangaroos in 7th and 8th, and Richmond for Fremantle in 11th and 14th.

There was more movement in team Rankings on the component Offence and Defence Ratings, though only one move of more than two places, Fremantle falling from 9th to 12th on Defence after allowing the at-the-time 13th-ranked Richmond Offence to register 28 Scoring Shots against them at home.

Plotting the underlying component Ratings against the backdrop of historical Ratings after Round 9s across the seasons reveals that Geelong now has a Combined Rating roughly equal to that of the highest 10% of all Premiers and Runners Up at this point of the season. Only four other teams - GWS, the Western Bulldogs, West Coast and Sydney - have Combined Ratings equal to or greater than the highest 50% of all Premiers and Runners Up at this point of the season.

(Note that the cutoffs here don't provide a direct estimate of the likelihood of a team with a given Rating making the Grand Final, but instead of where a team with a given Rating would rank amongst all previous Premiers and Runners Up should they eventually make the Grand Final. In other words, we're looking at the blue dots in the context of the red and orange ones, ignoring the grey ones, which are the teams that didn't finish as Premiers or Runners Up. For next week I'll investigate a more direct measure of the likelihood of a team making the GF given its Rating.)

 

Seven teams have Combined Ratings roughly equal to or less than the lowest Rating recorded by any subsequent Premier or Runner Up at this point in the season. Those teams are St Kilda, Melbourne, Fremantle, Carlton, the Brisbane Lions, Essendon, and the Gold Coast. Any of those teams would create MoSSBODS history by playing in the Grand Final this season.

The round-by-round dynamics of every team's MoSSBODS Rating so far this season is shown in the animation that follows. (Here too the other dots portray the Ratings of every other team in history after Round 9 of their respective seasons.)

Finally, the changes in the most recent round are summarised in the chart below, which this week comes in a slightly different, hopefully clearer, format.

From this we can see that

  • Seven team's Offensive and Defensive Ratings both improved: Adelaide, Collingwood, the Kangaroos, Melbourne, Richmond, St Kilda and the Western Bulldogs
  • Seven team's Offensive and Defensive Ratings both declined: the Brisbane Lions, Carlton, Essendon, Fremantle, Geelong, Gold Coast, and GWS. These teams are the opponents of those in the list above.

All four remaining teams, Hawthorn, Port Adelaide, Sydney and West Coast, saw their Defensive Ratings increase and their Offensive Ratings fall. They all played in games where the total Scoring Shot count was relatively low.

Across all three of MoS' Team Rating Systems then, the teams Ranked most differently by MoSSBODS compared to both MARS and ChiPS are:

  • The Western Bulldogs: ranked 8th by MARS and ChiPS, 4th by MoSSBODS
  • Sydney: ranked 1st by MARS and ChiPS, 5th by MoSSBODS
  • The Kangaroos: ranked 5th by MARS and ChiPS, 8th by MoSSBODS