The Pies have spent most of this week on the TAB doing what handwritten correspondence and nuanced political debate has been doing over the past few decades: going slowly out of favour. 

Priced as $1.80 favourites when the market was first posted only hours after the Cats' victory over the Eagles on Saturday, Collingwood now find themselves at $2.00 underdogs, which represents about a 5% reduction in their implicit victory probability in just 4 days.

Whether that price is an overreaction to the Pies' recent form only Saturday will reveal, but it's a price attractive enough to have mildly tempted the Head-to-Head Fund, resulting in a timid 0.6% wager on the Pies as a result. At the same time the Line Fund's been much keener about the Pies giving 2.5 start at $2.05 and so has outlayed 3.6% of the Fund on them to cover.

Viewed one way, history, perhaps surprisingly, is not in the Pies' favour, since the five GFs involving teams from 1st and 2nd on the ladder have resulted in wins for the team from 2nd 60% of the time.

Taking a slightly broader perspective however, that same history could be said to narrowly favour the Pies since teams from 1st on the ladder have a 4 and 3 record in Grand Finals over the past 12 seasons compared with a 4 and 4 record for teams from 2nd.

In percentage terms, teams from 3rd on the ladder have the best record of all with a winning percentage of around 67%. The trouble is, such teams rarely make it to the last weekend - teams from 3rd have appeared in only 25% of all Grand Finals from 2000 to 2011.

Before leaving this review of Finals history, if we consider the all-Finals averages of teams from each ladder position we see that teams from 2nd have the best record of all having won almost three-quarters of the 34 Finals they've played in since season 2000. The next-best record - just over 70% - belongs to teams from 1st on the ladder after which it's a long drop to the next-best performed teams, those from 6th which have a 50% record though little and entirely unsatisfying Preliminary Final experiences and no Grand Final history at all.

Teams from 7th fare worst of all teams having won just 2 of 12 Elimination Finals and neither of the two Semi Finals in which they've appeared.

This week's twin wagers on the Pies make for yet another simple wager summary. The only path to profit is a Pies victory by 3 points or more; any other result means further loss for Investors.

(In the table at right I've included the details for a drawn game, which is an outcome I think is again possible this year, though this time only after periods of extra time.)

Three of the four Head-to-Head Tipsters are also predicting Collingwood victories, as are ten of the thirteen Margin Predictors and three of the four Head-to-Head Probability Predictors.

Eleven of the Margin Predictors, however, are tipping victory margins of less than 3 points, nine of them siding with the Pies and two with the Cats. The remaining Predictors are the neural network based duo, one of which is opting for about a 7-point Cats victory and the other for an 18-point Pies win. The average prediction is for a 1-point Pies win.

A similar level of cautious support for the Pies is evident amongst the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors, the TAB bookmaker aside. ProPred, WinPred and H2H all rate the Pies as about 51-52% chances on Saturday.

The Line Fund is far more confident about Collingwood's chances of going back-to-back, rating them as 61% chances of not just winning but of winning by 3 points or more.

All indicators then seem to suggest that we're in for an exceptionally close Grand Final on Saturday.

With the exception of last year's first Grand Final, close GFs have not been the norm in recent history, as the table at left shows. Only 1 in 6 Grand Finals has produced a victory margin under 1 goal, and only 3 of the past 32 Grand Finals have been won this narrowly.

Even if we expand our definition of "close" to include any margin under 3 goals, we've still only witnessed 6 close GFs since 1980.

Instead, larger victory margins have been the norm, with over 70% of all GFs in this period being won by more than 4 goals and over one-third being won by 8 goals or more.