2023 - Team Ratings After Round 8
/Round 8 went pretty much to script and resulted in only two pairs of two team trading places on MoSSBODS, and just eight teams moving by a single spot on MoSHBODS.
The Top 3 on MoSSBODS is now Cats, Pies, and Dees, and on MoSHBODS is Cats, Pies, and Lions.
The correlation between MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS Combined Ratings now stands at +0.9923.
On the Component Ratings, on offence we find MoSSBODS now with a Top 3 of Cats, Lions, and Pies, and MoSHBODS still with a Top 3 of Cats, Lions, and Dons, while on defence we find both now with a Top 3 of Saints, Pies, and Cats.
To put the latest MoSSBODS Ratings in some historical context, here are the Ratings of all teams after Round 8 across V/AFL history.
Collingwood and Geelong, still, are the only teams that have Combined Ratings that are in the top 50% of teams that eventually went on to make the Grand Final, but Geelong is now pressing to enter the top decile.
We can also review the trajectory that each team has followed to arrive at its current Rating.
On MoSSBODS, 8 teams are now rated positively on offence and defence (no change), 5 are rated negatively on both (down 1), 1 is rated positively on offence but negatively on defence (no change), and 4 are rated negatively on offence but positively on defence (up 1). St Kilda continues to have a quite unusual pairing of low offensive and high defensive ratings.
The correlation between the teams’ MoSSBODS offensive and defensive Ratings now stands at +0.6, which is down a little on last week.
And, finally, to MARS, which re-ranked just seven teams this week, and none of them from the Top 3 or Bottom 4.
Geelong remains top, ahead of Melbourne and Brisbane Lions, with Collingwood and St Kilda both leap-frogging Sydney, who were the only team to move by multiple spots.
There are still 10 teams rated average or better-than-average by MARS, with Essendon on 999.5 only just missing that list.
The Rating gap between first and last currently stands at just over 75 Rating Points, which is up by about another 2 Rating Points on where it was last week. The gap between first and eighth now stands at just under 27 Rating Points, which is about the same as last week.
(Just briefly on the efficacy of MARS Ratings, so far this season, a simple MARS-based model that created margin forecats by taking 75% of the difference in the teams’ MARS Ratings and adding 14 points if the home team was playing in its home state and the away team was not, would have a very creditable MAE of 25.3 points per game)
Looking across the rankings of all three Systems and ordering the teams based on the current competition ladder, we find relatively large differences between the teams’ ladder positions and their rating system ordering for:
HIGHER ON LADDER THAN ON RANKING SYSTEMS: St Kilda
LOWER ON LADDER THAN ON RANKING SYSTEMS: Geelong and Sydney
MARS this week again provides the most outlying rankings of the three Systems, it having the outright most-extreme ranking for eight of the teams. MARS is especially different in terms of its Richmond and Adelaide rankings.
MoSSBODS has the outright most-extreme ranking for five of the teams, and MoSHBODS for only two.
MoSHBODS and MARS now agree about the ranking of 10 teams, MoSSBODS and MARS about seven teams, and MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS about 11 teams.
Lastly, if we consider the range of rankings that the three Systems have attached to each team, we find that Adelaide (4 spots) has the widest range of rankings, while 14 teams have rankings than differ by no more than 2 spots, including Essendon, Fremantle, Geelong, Gold Coast, GWS, Hawthorn, and Sydney, for which all three Systems have the same ranking.
