The Swans' 38-point victory over the Suns and the Eagles' 8-point loss to the Dogs together were enough to convince MARS to move the Swans into top spot on its Ratings. ChiPS already had the Swans ranked 1st before the round commenced, and continues to hold that opinion now, though the gap between the Swans and the Eagles remains a tiny 0.4 Rating Points (RP).

On MARS we have now a situation I can't recall seeing previously, where the top 9 teams are all rated 1,014 or higher and the bottom 8 teams are rated roughly 990 or lower. There's a similar though less dramatic cleavage on ChiPS, the top 8 teams being rated about 1,013 or higher, and the bottom 5 about 990 or lower. 

The competition ladder also hints at a schism of the same sort, the top 8 teams having scored 50% of the aggregate points but conceded only 38% of them.

Altogether, nine teams changed ranking on MARS and eight on ChiPS this week, leaving the two Systems differing in their ranking by more than two places for just a pair of teams:

• GWS, ranked 8th by MARS and 3rd by ChiPS
• Hawthorn, ranked 3rd by MARS and 7th by ChiPS

The correlation between raw ChiPS and MARS Ratings now stands at +0.976.

MoSSBODS RATINGS

MoSSBODS remains far less impressed by the Swans' abilities and continues to rank the Cats as the best team in the competition on Combined Rating, and Sydney as only the 6th-best.

Looking lower down the ordering we see that MoSSBODS flipped the rankings of the Dogs and the Eagles in 2nd and 3rd on the basis of the weekend's result between the two teams.

In total, only eight teams changed ranks on Combined Ratings this week and only one by more than a single place, GWS, falling two places into 4th after registering just 18 Scoring Shots against the Cats, and conceding 28. Component rankings were only a little less stable this week, nine teams seeing their Offensive ranking change and 10 seeing their Defensive ranking change.

Hawthorn, sliding two places into 7th, and Port Adelaide, climbing two places into 6th, were the biggest movers on Offensive rankings, while Adelaide (up 3 into 9th), Port Adelaide (up 3 into 11th), Richmond (down 3 into 14th), and St Kilda (down 3 into 13th) were the biggest movers on Defensive rankings. At the end of the round, 10 teams had positive Offensive ratings and only eight had positive Defensive ratings.

Once again, to gain some historical context, we plot those latest team ratings against every other team in history at the same point in their seasons.

North Melbourne's win has given them a Combined rating now more consistent with the group of teams that ultimately made the Grand Final in their respective year, while Port Adelaide clings to the back of that group and Collingwood dabbles at the very outer edges of it. The eight teams below the Pies (in a Combined Rating sense) need to make MoSSBODS history to play in the Grand Final.

Applying this same historical data to estimate a likelihood of playing in the Grand Final, using the same methodology as was described last week (and with the same strong caveats), we arrive at the chart below, which broadly reflects the conclusions in the previous paragraph.

MoSSBODS' top 8 matches the competition ladder's top 8, albeit in quite a different order, and this chart suggests that all of them have between about a 13% (North Melbourne) and a 35% (Geelong) chance of playing in the Grand Final, with most in the 20% to 30% range. Port Adelaide has the best chance amongst the remaining teams, and it's only about a 6% chance.

Again I would stress that these estimates do not take into account the remaining draws for any of the teams.

To see where every team started the season and the path each has traversed to arrive at its current ratings we can review the animation below.

Here too, the ratings after each round are contexted by displaying the ratings of every team in history at the same point in their respective season.

One of the notable features of the positions after Round 11 is how few Grand Finalists had a negative Combined rating at that point of the season.

The last step in that animation - the one from the end of Round 10 to the end of Round 11 - is depicted in the chart below where we can see that the movements this week have been generally small.

Six teams saw their Offensive and Defensive ratings increase this week (Geelong, West Coast, Adelaide, North Melbourne, Port Adelaide and Fremantle) while their six opponents (GWS, Western Bulldogs, St Kilda, Richmond, Collingwood and Essendon) saw their ratings decrease.