2021 - Team Ratings After Round 17

Despite dropping Rating points again this week, the Dogs remain the top-rated team on both Systems, although their lead now is only 1.6 Scoring Shots on MoSSBODS, and 4.9 points on MoSHBODS.

Further down the order there was quite a bit of movement, with a dozen teams changing places on MoSSBODS and on MoSHBODS. The big movers on MoSSBODS were St Kilda (up 3), Sydney and Essendon (up 2), and Port Adelaide and Richmond (down 3), while on MoSHBODS they were St Kilda (up 4), Essendon, Collingwood, and West Coast (up 2), Carlton, GWS, and Adelaide (down 2), and Richmond (down 4).

Currently, both Systems have the same Top 5 and Bottom 1.

The correlation between MoSSBODS’ and MoSHBODS’ Combined Ratings stands at +0.9974, and the Rating gap between 1st and 8th has shrunk to 6 Scoring Shots on MoSSBODS and 20.3 Points on MoSHBODS. Eight teams are now rated as above-average on MoSSBODS and on MoSHBODS.

On the Component Ratings, on Offence MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS now have Top 3s of Dogs, Lions, and Dees (the latter replacing the Cats on both Systems), while on Defence their shared Top 3s are now Dees, Dogs, and Cats. MoSSBODS now has seven teams rated above-average on offence, and 13 rated above-average on defence, while MoSHBODS has only six rated above-average on offence, but also 13 rated above-average on defence

On MoSSBODS, 7 teams are now rated positively on offence and defence (up 3), 5 are rated negatively on both (down 1), none are rated positively on offence but negatively on defence (down 1), and 6 are rated negatively on offence but positively on defence (down 1). The correlation between the teams’ MoSSBODS offensive and defensive Ratings now stands at +0.698, which is up on last week’s number.

In the animation below, we can see the path that each team has taken to arrive at its current Rating.

And, in the chart below, we can see how the current crop of teams compares with the Premiers and Runners Up across V/AFL history at the same point in their respective home-and-away seasons.

Team Ratings After R17 - with Quantiles and Annotations.png

We see that the Western Bulldogs are now coming back to the pack a little, but remain quite impressive in historical terms. Also, Melbourne are currently in a relatively little-explored area of the chart, with a high defensive rating but a much lower offensive rating.

And, finally, as always, to MARS, which re-ranked all but the bottom four teams this week.

Only Geelong, St Kilda, and Fremantle (up 2), and GWS (down 2), moved by more than a single spot, however.

With the Eagles dropping Rating Points again this week, MARS now has only seven teams rated as better-than-average, and has seven more Rated around 990 or above.

The Rating gap between first and last stands at just over 63 Rating Points and that between 1st and 8th at just under 30 Rating Points. 1st and 4th, however, are separated by less than 7 Rating Points, and 8th and 14th by just over 9 Rating Points. Here too then we are seeing some rating compression compared to last week.

The biggest gaps in the Ratings are between 5th and 6th (10.9 Rating Points), 15th and 16th, (8.7 Rating Points), and between 17th and 18th (7.1 Rating Points).

Looking across the rankings of all three Systems and ordering the teams based on the current competition ladder, we find the highest differences for Collingwood and Essendon where Rating System rankings are relatively higher than Ladder position, and for West Coast, where Rating System rankings are relatively lower than Ladder position.

MARS continues to provide the most outlying rankings of the three Systems, it having the outright most-extreme ranking for all but two of the teams.

By comparison, MoSSBODS has the outright most-extreme ranking for nine teams, and MoSHBODS has it for none at all.

MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS agree about the ranking of 9 teams, MoSSBODS and MARS about the ranking of just one team, and MoSHBODS and MARS about the ranking of three teams.

Lastly, if we consider the range of rankings that the three Systems have attached to each team, we find that West Coast, again, have the widest range of rankings (seven spots), while 11 teams have rankings that differ by no more than two spots, including North Melbourne, for which all three Systems have the same ranking.