Pointless v St Kilda

The Swans' 2nd and 3rd quarter performances last Saturday should not go unremarked.

In the 3rd quarter they failed to register a point, which is a phenomenon that's occurred in only 1.2% of all quarters ever played and in just 0.3% of quarters played since and including the 1980 season. Indeed, so rare is it that only one occurrence has been recorded in each of the last two seasons.

Round 1: The Washup

All things considered, I'd take those Round 1 results every time.

For Investors, the finest of traditions has been continued and many of them are now a little more wealthy than they were on Thursday, thanks entirely to a stirring comeback from the Hawks that, while ultimately unsuccessful in landing the two points, was good enough to prevent the Cats from covering the spread.

BKB, CTL and most of the heuristic tipsters bagged 6 tips, Chi and ELO bagged 4 (Chi having been 0 from 3 and down at half-time in the next two), and only Home Sweet Home scored worse than chance, recording just 3 from 8.

So, onto Round 2 ...

Gone in Nine Hundred Seconds

So much fanfare for so little action.

Just one bet this weekend: Hawthorn +17.5 against Geelong at $1.90.

(You can download the details via the Wagers, Tips & Results link at right.)

We would - indeed should - also have been on the Lions at -23.5 against West Coast except that the value in the bet disappeared with extraordinary speed earlier today. The Line market went up at 11:49am and then, in the time during which I ran the models and cranked out our bets, which took about 15 minutes, the Line market for the Lions/Eagles game went from $1.90/$1.90 to $1.80/$2.00. Clearly, a bunch of savvy punters saw the opportunity and took it, depriving us of our own opportunity to share in the imbalance. A move of 10c in the first fifteen minutes of a Line market suggests that someone got something terribly wrong.

Had the starts in other games been a little less generous we'd have also been on the Pies and Port (which sounds a little like a desperately unhealthy meal), but 21.5 and 22.5 points start respectively just don't quite offer enough value to justify a nibble.

On the tipping front Richmond, the Lions and St Kilda enjoy unanimous support. Bear in mind that, amongst the heuristic tipsters, all but Home Sweet Home follow Consult the Ladder in Round 1, so the near unanimity amongst them is somewhat artificial.

Chi's Game of the Round is tomorrow night's Richmond v Carlton game in which he's plumped for the Tigers by just 1 point. ELO's Game of the Round is the Hawks v Cats matchup for which it's also predicting a 1 point result. Both are tipping something of a blowout in the Lions/Eagles clash.

(Note that at this point there's no Line market for Sunday's Freo v Bulldogs game. I'll update the download file once this information is available.)

Here's to continuing the tradition of MAFL Round 1 success.

Waiting on Line

Hmmm. (Just how many ms are there in that word?)

It's Tuesday evening around 7pm and there's still no Line market up on TAB Sportsbet. In the normal course this market would go up at noon on Monday, and that's when the first match is on Friday night. So, this week the first game is 24 hours earlier than normal and the Line market looks as though it'll be delayed by 48 hours, perhaps more.

Curiouser still is the fact that the Head-to-Head market has been up since early March (at least) and there's an historical and strong mathematical relationship between Head-to-Head prices and the Line market, as the following chart shows.

The dark line overlaid on the chart fits the empirical data very well. As you can see, the R-squared is 0.944, which is an R-squared I'd be proud to present to any client.

Using the fitted equation gives the following table of Favourite's Price and Predicted Points Start:

Anyway, back to waiting for the TAB to set the terms of our engagement for the weekend ...

Marginally Interesting

Here are a handful of facts on AFL margins:

* The largest ever victory margin was 190 points (Fitzroy over Melbourne in 1979)

* Every margin between 0 and 150 points has been achieved at least once except margins of 136, 144, 145, 148 and 149 points.

* Last season, no game finished with a victory margin of 25 points

* No game finished with a margin of 47 points in the previous 2 seasons

* No game finished with a margin of 67 points in the previous 5 seasons

* No game finished with a margin of 90, 94 or 98 points in the previous 8 seasons

* No game finished with a margin of 109 points in the previous 12 seasons

* No game finished with a margin of 120 points in the previous 17 seasons

* No game finished with a margin of 128 points in the previous 39 seasons

* No game finished with a margin of 161 points in the previous 109 seasons

* At least one game has finished with a margin of 6 points in each of the previous 48 seasons

* At least one game has finished with a margin of 26 points in each of the previous 42 seasons

Draw Doesn't Always Mean Equal

The curse of the unbalanced draw remains in the AFL this year and teams will once again finish in ladder positions that they don't deserve. As long-time MAFL readers will know, this is a topic I've returned to on a number of occasions but, in the past, I've not attempted to quantify its effects.

This week, however, a MAFL Investor sent me a copy of a paper that's been prepared by Liam Lenten of the School of Economics and Finance at La Trobe University for a Research Seminar Series to be held later this month and in which he provides a simple methodology for projecting how each team would have fared had they played the full 30-game schedule, facing every other team twice.

Limning the Ladder

It's time to consider the grand sweep of football history once again.

This time I'm looking at the teams' finishing positions, in particular the number and proportion of times that they've each finished as Premiers, Wooden Spooners, Grand Finalists and Finalists, or that they've finished in the Top Quarter or Top Half of the draw.

Here's a table providing the All-Time data.



Note that the percentage columns are all as a percentage of opportunities. So, for a season to be included in the denominator for a team's percentage, that team needs to have played in that season and, in the case of the Grand Finalists and Finalists statistics, there needs to have been a Grand Final (which there wasn't in 1897 or 1924) or there needs to have been Finals (which, effectively, there weren't in 1898, 1899 or 1900).

Looking firstly at Premierships, in pure number terms Essendon and Carlton tie for the lead on 16, but Essendon missed the 1916 and 1917 seasons and so have the outright lead in terms of percentage. A Premiership for West Coast in any of the next 5 seasons (and none for the Dons) would see them overtake Essendon on this measure.

Moving then to Spoons, St Kilda's title of the Team Most Spooned looks safe for at least another half century as they sit 13 clear of the field, and University will surely never relinquish the less euphonius but at least equally as impressive title of the Team With the Greatest Percentage of Spooned Seasons. Adelaide, Port Adelaide and West Coast are the only teams yet to register a Spoon (once the Roos' record is merged with North Melbourne's).

Turning next to Grand Finals we find that Collingwood have participated in a remarkable 39 of them, which equates to a better than one season in three record and is almost 10 percentage points better than any other team. West Coast, in just 22 seasons, have played in as many Grand Finals as have St Kilda, though St Kilda have had an additional 81 opportunities.

The Pies also lead in terms of the number of seasons in which they've participated in the Finals, though West Coast heads them in terms of percentages for this same statistic, having missed the Finals less than one season in four across the span of their existence.

Finally, looking at finishing in the Top Half or Top Quarter of the draw we find the Pies leading on both of these measures in terms of number of seasons but finishing runner-up to the Eagles in terms of percentages.

The picture is quite different if we look just at the 1980 to 2008 period, the numbers for which appear below.



Hawthorn now dominates the Premiership, Grand Finalist and finishing in the Top Quarter statistics. St Kilda still own the Spoon market and the Dons lead in terms of being a Finalist most often and finishing in the Top Half of the draw most often.

West Coast is the team with the highest percentage of Finals appearances and highest percentage of times finishing in the Top Half of the draw.