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 MoreScoring Shot Conversion History in the VFL/AFL (1897-2015)
/The off-season always seems a good time for adopting a more sweeping historical perspective in the analyses here on MatterOfStats. Today we're going to be reviewing Scoring Shot Conversion rates across the 119 seasons of the VFL/AFL from both a venue and a team perspective.
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 MoreOn the Relative Importance of Offensive and Defensive Ability in VFL/AFL History
/In the previous post here I introduced MoSSBODS 2.0, a Team Rating System design to provide separate Offensive and Defensive Ratings for teams in the VFL/AFL. Today I want to explore the relationship between teams' Ratings and their on-field success.
Read MoreGrand Final Leads - How Much Is Enough?
/Quick question: what proportion of teams that have led at the end of the 1st Quarter of a Grand Final have gone on to take the Flag? Supplementary question: how big does the Quarter-time lead need to be before the probability reaches 90%?
Read MoreTeam-by-Team and Venue-by-Venue Conversion Rate History
/Today's post continues the recent theme of entries here in the Statistical Analysis part of the site, taking yet another look at Scoring Shot Conversion rates but this time on a team-by-team and venue-by-venue basis.
Read MoreConversion Rates in Finals versus Home-and-Away Games
/Subsequent to the previous post, which looked broadly at the differences in aggregate scoring metrics for Home-and-Away games compared to Finals from the same era, Friend of MoS, Liam, made a great suggestion for a follow up analysis.
Read MoreWhat's Different About Finals?
/Finals, by their nature, tend to pit more-evenly matched teams against one another, on average, than do games from the home-and-away season. It seems reasonable, therefore, to hypothesise that margins will tend to be smaller in Finals than in the home-and-away season, but what other changes in scoring behaviour might we expect to see?
Read MoreTeam Ratings and Ladder Finishes: 1999 to 2015
/There's been a lot of discussion about the unusual situation of Fremantle, which finds itself Minor Premiers but only on the third line of the Flag wagering markets.
Read MoreHome and Away Season Competition Points and Scoring Metrics
/On Twitter today someone made the observation that teams' accuracy or conversion rate differentials seemed to have been strongly correlated with their final ladder position.
Read MoreLeads and Lead Changes in AFL
/In the previous blog here on Statistical Analysis I referred to this paper and applied its drift-free Random Walk model to the "safety" of leads recent AFL history, finding that, to some extent, it fitted empirical data well.
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Are AFL Games Like Random Walks?
/I came across an interesting journal article this week, published in March of 2015 on arXiv.org and entitled "Safe Leads and Lead Changes in Competitive Team Sports".
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.
Read MoreBest and Worst AFL Teams 2005 - 2015: A MoSSBOD Perspective
/In the last blog on this part of the site I introduced the MoSSBOD Team Rating System, the defining characteristics of which were that it Rated teams based on Scoring Shot Production and Concession and that it provided both a Defensive and an Offensive Rating for all teams.
Today I want to explore the history of those Ratings across the last decade to see what MoSSBOD has to say about the strongest and weakest Offensive and Defensive teams across that period.
Read MoreWhat Lead's a Good Lead in the AFL?
/This 2015 season, seven rounds in, has felt like one where leads of any size have been less comfortable.
Read MoreKicking Accuracy : Teams, Rounds and Correlations
/Accurate kicking, obviously, contributes to a team's success. But, just how much does it contribute, what are some of the sources of its variability, and just how predictable is it?
Read MoreAFL Crowds and Optimal Uncertainty
/Fans the world over, the literature shows, like a little uncertainty in their sports. AFL fans are no different, as I recounted in a 2012 blog entitled Do Fans Really Want Close Games? in which I described regressions showing that crowds were larger at games where the level of expected surprisal or 'entropy' was higher.
Read MoreFitting Team Winning Percentages: Alternatives to Pythagorean Expectation
/I've addressed the topic of fitting a team's winning rate as a function of its scoring behaviour before on MoS, in discussions about Win Production Functions generally and in posts about Pythagorean Expectation specifically.
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