Do Bookies Undervalue Team Performance Metrics?

In 2003 Michael Lewis' Moneyball was published, in which he related the story of Billy Beane, Oakland A's General Manager, and his discovery that the market for baseball players mispriced particular skills. Some skills that could be shown, statistically, as being associated with greater team success weren't recognised as valuable (for example, getting on base, as measured by On-Base Percentage), while other skills were over-valued because of an historical belief that they were related to success (for example, batting in runs, as measured by RBI).

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Really Simple Proves Remarkably Effective

The Really Simple Margin Predictors (RSMPs), which were purpose-built for season 2013, have shown themselves to be particularly accurate at forecasting game margins. So much so, in fact, that they're currently atop the MAFL Leaderboard, ahead of the more directly Bookmaker-derived Predictors like Bookie_3 that have excelled in previous years.

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The Value of MARS Ratings Points Across Time Revisited

When last I considered the issue of the value of MARS Ratings across time I assessed their value in terms of a team's victory probability. Perhaps a more intuitive approach would be to, instead, value them in terms of a team's victory margin.

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On The Randomness of Final AFL Scores

You'd be forgiven for assuming that the last digit of a team's final score in an AFL contest was essentially random - in other words that it was as likely to be a 0 as a 1, a 4 or a 9.

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Measuring the Surprise in a Season's Results

In the previous blog we looked at the average level of surprisals generated by teams and by team pairings across all of VFL/AFL history and during the most-recent seasons. Today, as promised in that blog, I'm going to analyse surprisals using the same general methodology, but by season.

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