2016 - Team Ratings After Round 16

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The Saturday of a golfing tournament is sometimes referred to as "moving day". Round 16 of the AFL appears to have been "moving week".

MARS saw fit to alter the rankings of 12 teams this weekend, moving five teams up by a single spot, five others down by the same amount, as well as Collingwood up two places into 10th, and Fremantle down two places into 13th.

Most significantly, it moved all four of the Top 4 teams, installing Adelaide in 1st and Sydney in 3rd, while slipping West Coast back into 2nd and Hawthorn back into 4th.

ChiPS also re-ranked a dozen teams, though many of them with considerably more vigour, six teams moving by more than a single spot.

The climbers included Sydney, up 3 places into 1st, Hawthorn, up 3 places into 4th, Adelaide, up 2 places into 3rd, and Collingwood, up 2 places into 9th. Those slipping furthest were GWS, toppling 5 places into 6th, and Geelong dropping 3 places into 5th.

Every one of the teams in ChiPS' Top 7 at the end of Round 15 changed rank by the end of Round 16. That leaves ChiPS with a Top 4 of Sydney, West Coast, Adelaide and Hawthorn.

One remarkable outcome of all this turbulence in both Systems is that no team is now ranked more than two places differently by MARS and ChiPS, and that Adelaide and Sydney are the only teams for which the difference is even that large.

ChiPS now rates 10 teams above 1,000 (ie above "average"), though the gap between the Western Bulldogs in 8th and Collingwood in 9th is over 9 Rating Points (RPs).

MARS rates only 9 teams above 1,000, Port Adelaide the last of them, it rated a massive 18 RPs ahead of Collingwood in 10th.

The raw correlation between ChiPS and MARS ratings now stands at +0.986.

MoSSBODS RATINGS

MoSSBODS also re-ranked a dozen teams this week on Combined Ratings, eight by just a single place and four by two places or more.

Rising furthest was Sydney, up 3 places into 2nd, while Hawthorn (up 2 places into 5th) and Collingwood (up 2 places into 9th) were the other teams to climb multiple places. GWS was the only team to fall by more a spot. They slipped from 3rd into 6th.

That leaves MoSSBODS most at odds with MARS and ChiPS rankings for:

  • The Western Bulldogs, ranked 4th by MoSSBODS but only 7th by MARS and 8th by ChiPS
  • West Coast, ranked 7th by MoSSBODS but 2nd by MARS and by ChiPS

MoSSBODS Component rankings were, if anything, slightly less turbulent than Combined rankings, with Hawthorn (up 2 places into 4th) and St Kilda (down 3 places into 13th) the only teams to move by two or more places on Offensive Ratings, and Sydney (up 2 places into 1st), Melbourne (up 2 places into 12th), and GWS (down 3 places into 10th) the only teams to move by two or more places on Defensive Ratings.

Putting these new ratings in an historical context, we see that Adelaide is the only team with a Combined Rating placing it in the top decile of all previous Grand Finalists at this point in the season.

The next two teams - Sydney and Geelong - are all rated at about the median of previous Grand Finalists, while the Western Bulldogs, Hawthorn, GWS and West Coast are all rated slightly lower than that.

Collingwood and the Kangaroos are both rated slightly below the 9th decile of previous Grand Finalists, and Port Adelaide and Melbourne are the only other teams with a Combined Rating higher than at least one previous Grand Finalist.

Adelaide's ascendancy this season is documented in the animated GIF below, where you see that its most recent Combined Rating increases have come about mostly as a consequence of improvement in its Defensive Rating.

The last step of that dance, including Adelaide's latest Defensive Rating increase, is shown in the following, final chart for the week.

Here we see that six teams improved both their Offensive and Defensive Ratings this week (Sydney, Hawthorn, Collingwood, Melbourne, Richmond, and Essendon) and that six saw a decline in both (Geelong, the Western Bulldogs, GWS, Port Adelaide, St Kilda, and Fremantle).