Winning and Losing Streaks and Their Effects on Team Scoring

The idea for this blog came in an e-mail from long-time Friend of MoS, Michael, who wondered if the absence of lengthy winning streaks by teams like Hawthorn in 2015 reflected some feature of the game of Australian Rules or of the AFL competition that rendered such streaks self-limiting in length.

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On the Relative Importance of Offensive and Defensive Ability in VFL/AFL History

In the previous post here I introduced MoSSBODS 2.0, a Team Rating System design to provide separate Offensive and Defensive Ratings for teams in the VFL/AFL. Today I want to explore the relationship between teams' Ratings and their on-field success.

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An Improved VFL/AFL Team Rating System: MoSSBODS 2.0

Earlier this year in this blog, I introduced the MoSSBODS Team Rating System, an ELO-style system that provides separate estimates of each team's offensive and defensive abilities, as well as a combined estimate formed from their sum. That blog post describes the main motivations for a MoSSBODS-like approach, which I'll not repeat here.

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What's Different About Finals?

Finals, by their nature, tend to pit more-evenly matched teams against one another, on average, than do games from the home-and-away season. It seems reasonable, therefore, to hypothesise that margins will tend to be smaller in Finals than in the home-and-away season, but what other changes in scoring behaviour might we expect to see?

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Can We Use Head-to-Head Market Movements in the Line Market?

Yesterday's post led to an interesting Twitter thread last evening, which included a suggestion to reanalyse the data to determine whether price movements in the Pinnacle head-to-head market might have predictive value in other markets for the same game, specifically in the line market.

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Is There a Signal in Head-to-Head Market Movements?

Watching the TAB markets as they've shifted across the course of a week I've often wondered if there might be something predictive in those movements. If the eventual favourite's price has shortened during the week, does it win more or less often than its closing price would suggest?

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Predicting Bookmaker Head-to-Head Prices : Five Years On

Recently, in light of the discussions about the validity of the season simulations written up over on the Simulations journal, I got to thinking about modelling the Bookmaker's price-setting behaviour and how it might be expected to respond to the outcomes of earlier games in the season. It's a topic I've investigated before, but not for a while.

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When Favourites Lose: Accuracy or Scoring Shot Production?

In today's post I'll review the performance of all the teams that have been assessed as favourites by the TAB in games played during the period 2006 to the end of Round 17 in 2015, excluding only those games where the TAB bookmaker installed equal-favourites.

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Winning Scores and Underdogs' Chances

Recently, I noted, somewhat in passing in this piece on close game and blowouts, the decline in overall team scoring, a topic that's receiving not a little attention within the football community at the moment, fuelled partly by some recent low-scoring games, in particular the Dees v Lions encounter.

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Best and Worst AFL Teams 2005 - 2015: A MoSSBOD Perspective

In the last blog on this part of the site I introduced the MoSSBOD Team Rating System, the defining characteristics of which were that it Rated teams based on Scoring Shot Production and Concession and that it provided both a Defensive and an Offensive Rating for all teams.

Today I want to explore the history of those Ratings across the last decade to see what MoSSBOD has to say about the strongest and weakest Offensive and Defensive teams across that period.

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