In the previous blog I suggested that, based on winning percentages when facing finalists, the top 8 teams (well, actually the top 7) were of a different class to the other teams in the competition.

Current MARS Ratings provide further evidence for this schism. To put the size of the difference in an historical perspective, I thought it might be instructive to review the MARS Ratings of teams at a similar point in the season for each of the years 1999 to 2010.

(This also provides me an opportunity to showcase one of the capabilities - strip-charts - of a sparklines tool that can be downloaded for free and used with Excel.)

In the chart, each row relates the MARS Ratings that the 16 teams had as at the end of Round 22 in a particular season. Every strip in the chart corresponds to the Rating of a single team, and the relative position of that strip is based on the team's Rating - the further to the right the strip is, the higher the Rating.

The red strip in each row corresponds to a Rating of 1,000, which is always the average team Rating.

While the strips provide a visual guide to the spread of MARS Ratings for a particular season, the data in the columns at right offer another, more quantitative view. The first column is the average Rating of the 8 highest-rated teams, the middle column the average Rating of the 8 lowest-rated teams, and the right column is the difference between the two averages. Larger values in this right column indicate bigger differences in the MARS Ratings of teams rated highest compared to those rated lowest.

(I should note that the 8 highest-rated teams will not always be the 8 finalists, but the differences in the composition of these two sets of eight team don't appear to be material enough to prevent us from talking about them as if they were interchangeable.)

What we see immediately is that the difference in the average Rating of the top and bottom teams this year is the greatest that it's been during the period I've covered. Furthermore, the difference has come about because this year's top 8 has the highest-ever average Rating and this year's bottom 8 has the lowest-ever average Rating.

The season that produced the smallest difference in average Ratings was 1999, which was the year in which 3 teams finished just one game out of the eight and another finished just two games out. That season also produced the all-time lowest rated top 8 and highest rated bottom 8.

While we're on MARS Ratings and adopting an historical perspective (and creating sparklines), here's another chart, this one mapping the ladder and MARS performances of the 16 teams as at the end of the home-and-away seasons of 1999 to 2010.

One feature of this chart that's immediately obvious is the strong relationship between the trajectory of each team's MARS Rating history and its ladder fortunes, which is as it should be if the MARS Ratings mean anything at all.

Other aspects that I find interesting are the long-term decline of the Dons, the emergence of Collingwood, Geelong and St Kilda, and the precipitous rise and fall of the Eagles.

I'll finish this blog with one last chart, this one showing the MARS Ratings of the teams finishing in each of the 16 ladder positions across seasons 1999 to 2010.

As you'd expect - and as we saw in the previous chart on a team-by-team basis - lower ladder positions are generally associated with lower MARS Ratings.

But the "weather" (ie the results for any single year) is different from the "climate" (ie the overall correlation pattern). Put another way, for some teams in some years, ladder position and MARS Rating are measuring something different. Whether either, or neither, is measuring what it purports to -relative team quality - is a judgement I'll leave in the reader's hands.