I've been hearing a lot of references recently - especially from US pundits - about people "not wanting to get over their skis" and, in that spirit, I'm cautious about overstating the Tigers' dominance at this point in the season. MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS, however, seem to be deeply dispassionately enamoured with them at the moment.

It was yet another good round for favourites, with eight of them winning again this week, taking Bookie Knows Best's season tally to 44.5 from 63 (71%), a tally matched only by ENS_Linear.

There are high levels of agreement this week across the four forecasters, with the range of totals across the quartet in the nine games no higher than 9.5 points in any of them. The two bookmakers are especially close in their opinions, perhaps partly because the TAB waited until today (Thursday) to reveal theirs, just 36 hours or so before the start of the round, and having had a couple of days to reflect on Centrebet's.

This week sees the largest bookmaker average expected margin of the season - an average that also exceeds that for every round of 2017.

A little less shuffling of the teams on the MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS ladders this week, but some large movements nonetheless.

Eight of nine favourites collected the points this week, and the MoS twins recorded mean absolute errors (MAEs) under 21.5 points per game - and still lost ground to every other Margin Predictor except C_Marg. Fair to say it was much easier to be close to right this week than it was to be disastrously wrong.

When the bookmakers go low, the MoS twins go lower ...

In the context of a typical, recent Round 6, this week offers a set of relatively close games with an average expected margin of under 20 points per game, but in the context of this season, that's slightly less the case. 

MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS, like reality show judges, continued their brutal ways this week, re-ranking teams by as many as six places. .

When C_Marg produces the round's lowest mean absolute error (MAE), you know it's been a slightly unusual week.

This week marks the first round of the season where both the TAB and Centrebet bookmakers estimate that the nine games will average under 180 points.

As I opined at the end of the previous blog on team ratings, last week felt like a clear inflexion point in the season, underscored perhaps most dramatically by the Crows' loss to the Pies, but with contributions from the significant victory margins in many other of the games.

Both MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS are unforgiving about hefty losses in the early parts of seasons (it's how they prevent themselves from hanging on too long to their memories of teams' form in the previous season), which has led to some significant team rating and ranking changes this week.

In a week where six victory margins were over 40 points and the average margin was almost nine goals, it's not at all surprising that the mean Margin Predictor MAE was a season-high 42.5 points per game.

This week, the bookmakers are thinking even more like MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS, and are forecasting total scores of about 180 points per game, just 1 point per game more than the MoS twins.

As fans, we've had a very good run this season, with expected margins averaging under 15 points per game across the 27 games so far, and actual margins averaging just 27.4 points per game. (It's not hard, by the way, to show that the actual average will usually exceed the expected average - I'll do a post on this if there's any interest.)

As far as MoSSBODS is concerned, GWS' 27 scoring shots to 23 "victory" over Sydney on Saturday was good enough for them to retain the #1 ranking. MoSHBODS, which had a sneaky look at the final score as well, feels differently, and has instead moved Adelaide ahead of GWS, making it now three different teams that have held its #1 ranking over the course of the season so far.

As we expected, there was quite a spread in the forecaster performances this week, especially amongst the Head-to-Head Tipsters.

Turns out I was wrong to question MoSSBODS' judgement last weekend. Its suggestion that totals would prove to be generally lower than the bookmakers thought was proven right, although the actual average game total fell about halfway between the bookmakers' overly optimistic views and MoSSBODS' overly pessimistic ones. Details on this are at the end of this blog.

The tipping carnage in Round 2 was always a possibility this week given the general slightness of favouritism in each of the nine contests.