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

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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.

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The Ideal Competition: How Many Blowouts and Upsets?

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Working on a few recent posts here on the Statistical Analysis journal has made me think a lot more about blowouts (games won by a large margin) and upsets (games won by the team less-favoured to win pre-game), and realise how inter-related is their prevalence.

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Upsets and Mismatches in VFL/AFL History: A MoSSBODS 2.0 Perspective

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A few years ago, I used the MARS Rating System to identify those games from VFL/AFL history that might be considered as the greatest upsets in that the loser's MARS Rating was very much higher than the winner's.

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Winning Scores and Underdogs' Chances

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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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Measuring the Surprise in a Season's Results

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In the previous blog we looked at the average level of surprisals generated by teams and by team pairings across all of VFL/AFL history and during the most-recent seasons. Today, as promised in that blog, I'm going to analyse surprisals using the same general methodology, but by season.
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The Greatest Upset Victories in VFL/AFL History (1897-2012)

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The Suns' victory over the Saints in the first round of the 2013 season was heralded as an "upset win" for the Suns and one of the greatest in their short history. Undoubtedly their win was unexpected, but even the bookmakers rated the Suns as only $3.75 chances, so it was hardly a Halley's comet-like occurrence.
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