Strength of Schedule Assessments: A Quick Numerical Comparison
/With FMI today posting its assessment of the 2017 AFL draw, we now have (at least) the following comparable analyses:
The FMI blog has already discussed many of the major similarities and differences in these various assessments. In this blog, all I'd seek to add is, firstly, a tabulation and summary of all those opinions.
From this table I think it's fair to conclude that:
- GWS, Hawthorn and (possibly) the Western Bulldogs are clearly in the top one-third in terms of Schedule Strength
- Richmond, the Kangaroos and (probably) Gold Coast are in the bottom one-third
- Most of the debate is about the appropriate ranking of the schedules for Adelaide (ranked 9th to 18th), Essendon (ranked 8th to 18th), Fremantle (ranked 3rd to 13th), Sydney (ranked 2nd to 11th) and West Coast (ranked 3rd to 11th).
As a final piece, we can quantify the level of agreement between the various Strength of Schedule assessments either in terms of the raw scores or the rankings they provide. In either case, the results are very similar, as you can see from the tables at right.
The highest levels of agreement are registered for the FMI and RoCo (+0.85) assessments, the lowest for MoS and FMI (+0.49), TWF and FMI (+0.54), MoS and RoCo (+0.57), and The Wooden Finger and FMI (+0.59).
All other correlations lie between +0.67 and +0.80, which reflects the generally high levels of agreement between the various assessments.
The differences that we see, such as they are, reflect the different choices that have been made in the methodologies that have been applied. My guess is that, as in so much analytic work, none of the assessments are as good as all of them - so I'd be, at least initially, guided in my final opinion by the "Summary" column in the first table.
