A few years back, I authored a blog post in which I deftly presented the case for the superiority of MAE over Accuracy for identifying the most talented forecasters.

Last season, we had the first partially player-based forecaster, MoSHPlay, which provided forecasts for game margins and game totals, and estimates of home team victory probabilities. It performed reasonably well in a year that was, in many ways, completely unlike those it had been trained on.

It used as inputs the margin and team score forecasts of MoSHBODS, and player ratings derived from historical SuperCoach scores.

In this blog I’ll take you through the process of reviewing the existing MoSHPlay forecasting equations, and investigate the efficacy of deriving player ratings from AFL Player Rating scores rather than from SuperCoach scores.

It feels slightly surreal that it’s only been a little over 12 months since last we did it, but it’s time to, once again, review the schedule for the men’s footy season ahead.

Perhaps naively in retrospect, I had hoped that the changes I made to the MoS twin algorithms in preparation for the 2020 season would be the last I’d need to make for a while. But, the unusual nature of 2020 fixturing highlighted some characteristics of both Systems that I thought needed redressing, so 2021 will see new versions of MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS providing key forecasts.