2021 - Team Ratings After Round 6

A dozen teams were again re-ranked on MoSSBODS this week, and a dozen also on MoSHBODS but, for the second week running, the Top 3 were left unchanged on both Systems as Western Bulldogs, Melbourne, and then Richmond. The two Systems also North Melbourne in 18th.

The big movers on MoSSBODS were Essendon and Gold Coast, who both climbed three places, and Collingwood, West Coast, and Adelaide, who all fell three. On MoSHBODS, the only teams to move more than two places were West Coast, down five spots, Collingwood, down three spots, and Essendon, up five spots.

The correlation between MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS Combined Ratings now stands at +0.9986, and the Rating gap between 1st and 8th stands at about 7 Scoring Shots on MoSSBODS, and 26 Points on MoSHBODS.

On the Component Ratings, MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS now have Top 3s of Dogs, Dees, and Tigers, while on Defence they still both have Top 3s of Dees, Dogs, and Tigers.

On MoSSBODS, 6 teams are now rated positively on offence and defence (no change), 5 are rated negatively on both (down 1), 3 are rated positively on offence but negatively on defence (up 2), and 4 are rated negatively on offence but positively on defence (down 1). The correlation between the teams’ MoSSBODS offensive and defensive Ratings now stands at +0.732, which is up again on last week’s number. This year, more than most, a team’s defensive ability is quite correlated with its offensive ability.

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

And, finally, to MARS, which re-ranked 14 teams this week, including swapping Port Adelaide into 1st, Western Bulldogs into 2nd, and Geelong into 3rd.

Only five teams moved by more than a single spot: Gold Coast (up 3), Geelong, and Fremantle (both up 2), and Richmond and St Kilda (both down 3).

With Sydney now Rated at 999.7, MARS has only seven teams rated as better-than-average, with 10 more Rated about 988 or above.

The Rating gap between first and last now stands at just 57 Rating Points (up about 3 Points). By comparison, at the same point last year the range was just under 44 Rating Points.

The gap between 1st and 8th is about 22 Rating Points, which equates to roughly 16 to 17 points at a neutral venue.

Looking across the rankings of all three Systems and ordering the teams based on the current competition ladder, we find the highest differences for Adelaide (and, to a lesser extent, Sydney and West Coast), where Rating System rankings are relatively lower than Ladder position, and for Collingwood (and, less so, Carlton and Richmond) where Rating System rankings are relatively higher than Ladder position.

MARS continues to provide the most outlying rankings of the three Systems, it having the outright most-extreme ranking for 13 of the teams, with Adelaide, and Collingwood the most notable examples.

By comparison, MoSSBODS has the outright most-extreme ranking for only one team, and MoSHBODS for only two.

MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS now agree about the ranking of 15 teams, MoSSBODS and MARS about the ranking of three teams, and MoSHBODS and MARS about the ranking of four teams.

Lastly, if we consider the range of rankings that the three Systems have attached to each team, we find that West Coast (7 spots) has the widest range of rankings, while 12 teams have rankings that differ by no more than 2 spots, including GWS, North Melbourne and St Kilda, for which all three Systems have the same ranking.