Matter of Stats

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2020 - Team Ratings After Round 4

Port Adelaide now tops, and Adelaide tails, both MoS Team Rating Systems.

In fact, the two Systems now have the same Top 3 and Bottom 4 teams, and disagree about the rest by no more than two places - and the difference is even that large only for Carlton, who are 7th on MoSSBODS and 9th on MoSHBODS.

Only one team moved by more than two places on MoSSBODS this week - Melbourne climbing 3 places into 10th -and just three teams (Melbourne up 3, North Melbourne down 3, and Sydney down 3) did the same on MoSHBODS.

The same nine teams are now rated as better-than-average by both Systems, albeit that they’re slightly differently ordered.

In terms of Rating compression, on MoSSBODS, 4th and 14th are now separated by only 4.9 Scoring Shots, while on MoSHBODS 4th and 12th are separated by only 12.5 points.

On the Component Ratings, on offence we find find MoSSBODS still with a Top 3 of Lions, Power and Cats, and MoSHBODS now coming to the same conclusion.

On defence, MoSSBODS still has a Top 3 of Collingwood, Richmond, and then Port Adelaide, while MoSHBODS has retained the same Top 2, but slotted Hawthorn into 3rd ahead of Richmond.

On MoSSBODS, 5 teams are now rated positively on offence and defence (up 1), 6 are rated negatively on both (no change), none are rated positively on offence but negatively on defence (down 2), and 7 are rated negatively on offence but positively on defence (up 1).

Only two teams are in different quadrants under the two Systems:

  • North Melbourne (negative offence and defence on MoSSBODS, negative offence and positive defence on MoSHBODS)

  • Essendon (negative offence and defence on MoSSBODS, negative offence and positive defence on MoSHBODS)

Lastly, let’s look at what MoS Elo stalwart MARS thinks about the teams.

It, like MoSHBODS, returned Port Adelaide to top spot this week, dropping Collingwood back to 2nd, and leaving Geelong in 3rd.

In total, all but six teams were re-ranked by MARS on the basis of the weekend’s results, but only two teams moved by more than a single spot. The Western Bulldogs climbed two places to 10th, and West Coast fell two placed to 11th.

With Sydney and West Coast shedding Rating Points, only eight teams are now rated as “above average” by MARS, while the gap between 1st and 10th rose to over 22 Rating Points.

It feels like a genuine hierarchy of teams is beginning to emerge, but I’m less confident this year that it will hold up over the rest of the season, given the huge uncertainties that remain.

Looking across the rankings of all three Systems and ordering the teams based on the current competition ladder (using competition points per game as the primary basis for that ordering), we find that Carlton (8 spots), and St Kilda, GWS, West Coast, and Sydney (all 5 spots) have the widest range of rankings, though 10 teams have rankings than differ by no more than 2 spots. Port Adelaide, Collingwood, and Hawthorn are the only teams, however, about which the three Systems completely agree.

MARS continues to provide the most outlying rankings of the three Systems, it having the outright most-extreme ranking for 14 of the teams. By comparison, MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS have it for only four teams.