A business trip to Melbourne had me literally in the air when, I suspect, the markets at the TAB and Sportsbet first posted. I only got to them around 3:30pm, by which time the Totals offered had miraculously aligned, leaving Investors with $1.90 and $1.88 prices for the same risk in each market. Zero diversification benefits, the. But, more of that later.

Perhaps a slightly easier round to tip this week, with the all-game average expected margin at 15.7 points per game, and with all but one of the games expected to be won by about 4 goals or less, the exception being the North Melbourne v Western Bulldogs game, which the away team is expected to win by about 7 goals.

At the end of Round 2, the MoS twins now agree about the Top 4 and the Bottom 3 teams (and five other of the teams in-between).

With all but Control The Ladder and Home Sweet Home bagging 8 from 9 correct tips amongst the Head-to-Head Tipsters this week, it’s almost enough to convince me that “accuracy” might be a reasonable measure of a forecaster’s ability (hint: it absolutely isn’t).

MoSHPlay is very conservative in Game 1 of Round 2

In a welcome development, all nine Totals markets were up on Tuesday morning, so MoSSBODS could choose from a full menu and, given its still relatively bearish outlook on scoring, it liked what it saw.

On paper, tipping winners should be a little harder this week, since the TAB bookmaker all-game average expected margin is down from 16.8 to 14.2 points per game, with 6 of the 9 games expected to be won by under 13 points.

The MoS twins are, by design, big on punishments and rewards during the early rounds of a new season, and this week the Swans and the Lions, in particular, demonstrated that.

All of the Head-to-Head Tipsters, bar Home Sweet Home, correctly selected five or six winners this week, which saw the all-Tipster average come in at 5.3.

MoSHPlay’s first forecast of the season is bold without being ridiculous. That’s a good start.

The MoS twins, again this year, are far less optimistic about the likely levels of scoring in Round 1 than are the bookmakers. Overall, the twins are predicting about 10 points per game fewer.

At the start of a season there’s always a non-trivial risk that the MoS models will come up with forecasts that are riotously different from the bookmakers’, but this year it’s almost as if those bookmakers holidayed at Chez MoS over the offseason.

Exactly 12 months ago today, I posted about the tipsters, predictors and Funds for the 2020 season.

The world has changed a bit since then, but MoS won’t be - well not by much.

In Round 22, the bookmakers recorded the smallest Mean Absolute Errors (MAEs) for Game Margins, Home Team Scores, and AwayTeam Scores, and MoSHBODS recorded the smallest MAE for Game Totals.

MoSHBODS’ relatively high and unfulfilled expectations of the Cats was enough to have it crown Richmond as the number 1 rated team at the end of the season, while MoSSBODS’ less lofty aspirations for the runners up saw it leave Geelong in top spot.

So, after 162 games and one of the most extraordinary seasons of all time for reasons unrelated to football, our three winners are:

Head-to-Head Tipster: MoSHPlay_Marg (116 correct tips, which is an accuracy of 72%)

Margin Predictor: Bookie_9 (MAE of 22.81 points per game)

Head-to-Head Probability Predictor: Bookie_LPSO (Average Log Probability Score of 0.1500 bits per game)

MoSHPlay’s first forecast of the season is bold without being ridiculous. That’s a good start.

In last year’s Grand Final, Richmond scored 47 points in the first half. This year, even using the bookmakers’ more-generous estimates, they’re tipped to score only a couple of goals more in the entire contest.

Those bookmakers have estimated the total score for the match at 118.5 points, which is just a couple of points below the MoS twins’ estimates.

No matter how irrational it might be, recency bias will inevitably affect how a season’s performance of the MoS models will be remembered, and the result of the Grand Final will always be the most recent memory from that season. As such, the forecasts for that game always take on added, if perhaps unwarranted, importance.

This year, the MoS twins are both tipping an upset Cats victory, which, if anything, heightens the stakes.

And it came to pass that the two highest-ranked teams on all three MoS Team Rating Systems progressed to the Grand Final.

On MoSSBODS, Geelong will enter that Grand Final with 3.7 SS Rating advantage, and on MoSHBODS with a 6.7 points advantage.