2014 - Team Ratings After Round 8
/West Coast and Sydney were the two biggest Ratings Point (RP) accumulators in a truncated Round 8, West Coast ending a five-week long Ratings slump and Sydney extending a now four-week long Ratings climb as a result.
Hawthorn, despite handing 2.6 RPs to Sydney, remain ranked first by ChiPS and still enjoy a greater than 16 RP buffer to second-placed Geelong. A little further down the ChiPS ladder in 5th and 6th places, Sydney's gain and Fremantle's loss served to substantially narrow the Ratings gap between those two teams.
Ten teams now hold above-average 1,000 Ratings on ChiPS, though Essendon, after losing 0.3 RPs, are precipitously close to falling below that mark, while West Coast, after gaining 4.2 RPs, are just 0.4 RPs away from rising above it.
Nine teams (including all of the bottom five) are ranked identically by ChiPS and MARS, and six more have rankings that differ by no more than a single place. That leaves just three teams for which the ranking difference is greater than a single place: Collingwood (4th on ChiPS and 6th on MARS), Sydney (6th on ChiPS and 3rd on MARS), and West Coast (11th on ChiPS and 8th on MARS).
With such similarity in ranking, it's no surprise that the team-by-team Rating charts also still look very similar for ChiPS and MARS.
Similar too are the rankings for all teams when we add the Massey, Colley and ODM Systems into the mix.
Such non-trivial differences as there are appear to be greatest for Colley, which remains notably more enamoured of the Suns than the other Systems; for MARS, which is similarly well-disposed towards the Swans; and for MARS and ChiPS together, which both rank more highly the Tigers and more lowly the Suns and the Giants.
ODM has significantly lowered its ranking of the Crows' and the Roos' offences over the past few weeks, this despite neither of the teams even taking the field in Round 8. It's also significantly raised the offensive rankings of GWS, Sydney, West Coast and the Western Bulldogs.
Defensively, the most dramatic recent reassessment by ODM has been the down-ranking of the competition-leading Hawks, the most recent decrease for them being an approximate mirror-image of the Swans' offensive ranking increase, both changes driven by the same half of the same scoreline.
Looking lastly at the simple predictive accuracy of the various Rating Systems, last week's results enabled ChiPS to restore its lead over MARS to 3, and Massey to lower its deficit relative to MARS to 5. ODM remains 10 tips adrift of MARS (and its components 7 and 8 tips adrift), while Colley has slumped to be now 11 tips behind.
