2015 - Team Ratings After Round 25
/With a surprising result in one of the weekend's two games and, more relevantly, surprising margins in both, Rating changes, especially on MARS, were larger than we'd expect in the Finals.
ChIPS stripped about 1 Rating Point (RP) from both losing teams, transferring them to the victors, while MARS moved 4.6 RPs from the Crows to the Hawks, and 3.4 RPs from the Swans to the Roos.
Those swaps elevated the Roos into 5th, above Fremantle on ChiPS, and into 7th, above Adelaide on MARS.
As far as ChiPS is concerned then, our two Preliminary Finals pit the 2nd-highest Rated team against the 5th-highest, and the 6th-highest Rated team against the highest. MARS, instead, believes we have the 2nd-highest Rated versus the 7th-highest, and the 5th-highest Rated against the highest.
MARS Ratings, however, have not been a particularly reliable guide to Preliminary Final winners since 2000, as the table below reveals. Eight of the 30 successful Preliminary Finalists in that period have had lower MARS Ratings than their opponents, though if we add a nominal 15 RP boost for playing as the Home team we find that this number drops to just three.
In that same period, only one Bookmaker favourite has lost, this the Saints team of 2005 in the game highlighted below, where they went down to the Swans by 31 points. Given that statistic, Fremantle would need to buck the trend to emerge victorious next Friday night, they having been installed $2.35 underdogs to the Hawks.
Conversely, one other statistic might be quoted to give Fremantle supporters some hope: in only five of the 30 Preliminary Finals has a team from lower on the ladder defeated one from higher on the ladder, and there've been no such occurrences since 2006.
