UPDATE: Close Games in VFL/AFL History: Do Successful Teams Win Them?
/Back in November of 2015, I wrote this piece on the topic of close games in response to the claims being made then about the ability of good teams to win close games.
Read MoreClose 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 MoreCompetitiveness in the VFL/AFL (1897-2015)
/It's been a while since we've reviewed the history of game margins and, in today's blog, we'll consider that history from a number of perspectives.
Read MoreUnexpectedly Large Victories in NRL: Parallels With AFL
/In the previous post we saw that large or what might be called "blowout" victories in AFL games occurred at a rate much higher than the rate at which bookmakers assigned equally large handicaps to those same games, and we saw why this might be the case from a theoretical perspective on the assumption that AFL game margins were Normally distributed.
Read MoreWhy There'll Always Be More Blowouts Than We Expect
/Last night I was thinking about the results we found in the previous blog post about upsets and mismatches and wondered if the historical pattern of expected game margins was borne out in the actual results. On analysing the data I found that there were a lot more victories of 10 Scoring Shots or more in magnitude than MoSSBODS had predicted. In most seasons, at least one-third of the games finished with a victory margin equivalent to 10 Scoring Shots or more, which was usually two or three times as many as MoSSBODS had predicted.
Read MoreWinning Scores and Underdogs' Chances
/Recently, I noted, somewhat in passing in this piece on close game and blowouts, the decline in overall team scoring, a topic that's receiving not a little attention within the football community at the moment, fuelled partly by some recent low-scoring games, in particular the Dees v Lions encounter.
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