The Draw's Unbalanced: So What?

In an earlier blog we looked at how each team had fared in the 2010 draw and assessed the relative difficulty of each team's draw by, somewhat crudely, estimating a (weighted) average MARS of the teams they played.

From the point of view of the competition ladder, however, what matters is not the differences in the average MARS rating of the teams played, but how these differences, on a game-by-game basis, translate into expected competition points.

The 2010 Draw

The AFL's truncated draw will once again this year have a significant bearing on the composition of the final eight and we'll be spending this posting attempting to identify and quantify the implications for each team.

A Place (or Places) To Call Home

It's that time of year again when we need to ruminate over the draw and decide which team, if either, is really the home team for each game.

This year these decisions are even more complex than they usually are since, according to the AFL's official home team designations, 8 teams have two home grounds and 2 more have three home grounds across the season. The nomadic teams include 4 that play only a single game at one of their designated home grounds. I don't think it makes sense to designate a venue as home for a team if that team's players would, unaccompanied by team management, need to ask directions to find it.

Gotta Have Momentum

Momentum, footy commentators will assert at least a few dozen times a season, is vital. When a team has it they string passes together, goals together, quarters together, wins together, maybe even flags together; when they don't, well they don't string much together at all except excuses.

So, I wondered, what might momentum look like, which teams seem to display it and which don't?

To answer these questions I've analysed the win-loss records of the 16 teams over the past 10 seasons and investigated each team's ability to record back-to-back to results. If a team is prone to bouts of momentum then we'd expect it to record back-to-back wins at a rate higher than we could reasonably expect based on its average winning rate.

MAFL 2010 - The Tradition Continues

Welcome to MAFL 2010.

This year MAFL celebrates its 5th season of faithfully frustrating and sporadically enriching Investors. As I trust you've now come to expect, MAFL changes every year and, indeed, this year's MAFL is a little different from last year's.