Close Games in VFL/AFL History: Do Successful Teams Win Them?

/

Recently, we've looked at the history of margins, of blowouts, mismatches and upsets, and the history of conversion rates. Today we'll be looking at the history of close games, which I'll define as games that are decided by a goal or less.

Read More

Scoring Shot Conversion in the VFL/AFL - Quantifying Team, Venue and Era Effects

/

In the previous blog we reviewed the Conversion Rate history of the VFL/AFL competition looking, in turn, at how it has varied across eras for different venues and for different teams. That blog provides some useful context for this one and you might find it helpful to review it before proceeding.

Read More

How Many Eras of VFL/AFL Football Have There Been?

/

Most sporting codes with a history of any significant length will eventually be described in terms of having passed through a number of eras, one or both ends of which are usually defined by some relatively obvious characteristic that forms the basis of the discussion.

Read More

MARS Rating Changes and Scoring Percentages: 1897-2013

/
The idea for this blog sprang from some correspondence with Friend of MAFL, Michael, so let me start by thanking him for being the inspiration. Michael was interested in exploring the relationship between team performances and the resulting change in their MARS Ratings across a season, which I'll explore here by charting, for each team and every season, the for-and-against percentage they achieved in all games including Finals, and the change in their MARS Rating per game during that same season.
Read More

To Win A Grand Final You Must First Lead

/
History suggests that, as the higher-Rated "Home" team, Hawthorn must lead early and lead well if it is to be confident of success in Saturday's Grand Final, and not assume that its superior Rating will allow it to come back from any substantial deficit.
Read More

Prime Motivation: An Analysis of Prime Numbers in AFL Scoring

/
Earlier this week, the TED talk of Australian radio broadcaster, comedian and self-confessed number geek Adam Spencer was posted online. In it he explains his fascination with prime numbers, in particular the discovery of "monster primes", which got me to wondering about the prevalence of prime numbers amongst football scores.
Read More

Is Class More or Less Important In AFL Finals?

/
You'll hear it said about sport that class emerges when it's needed most. If that applies to football then you'd expect that better teams would be more likely to win games in the Finals than they are games in the regular home-and-away season.
Read More

Defensive and Offensive Abilities : Do They Persist Across Seasons?

/
In the previous blog we reviewed the relationship between teams' winning percentages in one season and their winning percentages in subsequent seasons. We found that the relationship was moderate to strong from one season to the next and then tapered off fairly quickly over the course of the next couple of seasons so that, by the time a season was three years distant, it told us relatively little about a team's likely winning percentage. There is, of course, an inextricable link between winning and scoring, and in this blog we'll investigate the temporal relationships in teams' scoring in much the same way as we investigated the temporal relationships in teams' winning in that previous blog.
Read More

What Do Seasons Past Tell Us About Seasons Present?

/
I've looked before at the consistency in the winning records of teams across seasons but I've not previously reported the results in any great detail. For today's blog I've stitched together the end of season home-and-away ladders for every year from 1897 to 2012, which has allowed me to create a complete time series of the performances for every team that's ever played.
Read More

Evidence for Intra-Game Momentum in AFL Games

/
So often in the commentary for an AFL game we hear it said that one team or the other "has the momentum going into the break". This blog sets out to examine this claim - how we might interpret it quantitatively and, given that interpretation, whether or not it's true.
Read More

Lead Changes as a Measure of Game Competitiveness

/
The final victory margin is one measure of how close a contest was, but it can sometimes mislead when the team that's in front midway through the final term piles on a slew of late goals against a progressively more demoralised opponent, improving its percentage in so doing, but also erasing any trace of the fact that the game might have been a close-run thing throughout the first three-and-a-half or more quarters.
Read More

1897 to 2011 : Winners v Losers - Leads, Scoring Shots and Conversion

/
In the previous blog, among other things we analysed which quarter winning teams win. We might also ask about winnng teams, in what proportion of games do they trail at the end of a particular quarter, and how has this proportion tracked over the seasons.
Read More

Predicting a Team's Winning Percentage for the Season

/
In recent blogs where I've been posting about a win production function the goal has been to fit a team's season-long winning percentage as a function of its scoring statistics for that same season. What if, instead, our goal was to predict a team's winning percentage at the start of a season, using only scoring statistics from previous seasons?
Read More

Underachieving and Overachieving Teams

/
A couple of blogs back I described some win production functions, which relate a team's winning percentage in the home-and-away season to characteristics of its scoring during that season, in particular to its rate of scoring shot production and its conversion of those scoring shots relative to its opponents'.
Read More

Grand Final Margins Through History and a Last Look at the 2010 Home-and-Away Season

/
A couple of final charts before GF 2.0.

The first chart looks at the history of Grand Finals, again. Each point in the chart reflects four things about the Grand Final to which it pertains ...
Read More